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Women looking to collect wins on the road

November 18, 2011
By Jason Sinukoff

The Mustangs women’s hockey team will hit the road this weekend to take on the Waterloo Warriors and the York Lions on Saturday and Sunday respectively. In the 13 games played, the Mustangs are a dead even 6-6-1.

For the Mustangs, preparing for the weekend is simple.

“We are just continuing to build on what we’ve been doing all season. We started off slowly, although we played well. We continued to play well. We’re working on skill development and trying to get everybody to be better,” Chris Higgins, Mustangs head coach, said. “Our goal is just to get better every game, every day.”

However, both Waterloo and York pose a different threat to the Mustangs’ dynamic play. For one, the women’s squad will have to find a way to solve the Warriors’ goaltending.

“Waterloo has an incredible goalie. They’ve been getting out-shot, for example 35-8 by Guelph and only lost 2-1 in overtime. So basically they don’t score a lot of goals, but they lead the league in goals against,” Higgins said. “We’ve got to make sure we don’t give them any easy goals, because they’re tough to score on.”

As far as the Lions go, they boast a tough defence and the Mustangs will have to figure out a way to break through if they want to win.

“York’s got some very good defencemen—that’s the strength of their team,” Higgins said.

The Mustangs have been rebuilding for the past couple of years, and Higgins decided to build his team around speed. This is the reason he and the Mustangs believe they will have the advantage over York come Sunday.

“There’s a couple of arenas like Guelph, Laurier and York that have the large Olympic ice surfaces […] We have built our team around speed, so we think we’re going to do very well [those teams] on the big ice surfaces.”

The team has won four of their last five games, so carrying that momentum into the weekend is crucial for them.

“The girls are on a high—we’ve won four of five. We know we’re playing well. Even games we’ve lost we know we played well. We actually think we’ve only had one bad game all year,” Higgins explained.

Along with riding their wave of momentum into the weekend, the Mustangs will have to continue with their strong penalty kill, but also improve on some aspects of their game.

“Our penalty killing is probably the best in the league. Our goals against average, with the exception of one game, would probably be amongst the top three in the league,” Higgins explained.

“Where we really need improve is we need scoring. Our powerplay needs to improve and we’ve got one line scoring, but we need some of our other lines to step up and put the puck in the net. They’ve got the talent, but they’ve just been a little snake-bitten, that’s all,” he continued.

Higgins is very proud of his team and is very excited for what the future holds for them.

“We’re a team of the future and the future may be November, December, January or February, but we’re really pumped about where we’re going,” Higgins said.

“I think the team is on its way to becoming a very strong team in [Ontario University Athletics]. It’s nice to see the turnaround.”

 

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