Growing up with Eagles
BC frosh learning on defense
By Steve Conroy
Friday, October 26, 2012 - Updated 8 hours ago
No one is about to feel bad for the Boston College hockey team.
When you’ve won three of the past five national championships, you don’t get a lot of sympathy, no matter what kind of issues you face.
The Eagles do face some challenges each year, like any team, and perhaps the biggest one they’re facing this season is on the blue line. BC lost three regulars on defense from last year’s title team — Tommy Cross, Brian Dumoulin and Edwin Shea — and those players are being replaced by three freshmen.
The good news is that the caliber of those freshmen, as one might expect, is pretty high. The jewel of the class is Michael Matheson, a 6-foot-2, 189-pounder from Pointe-Claire, Quebec, who was the first-round selection of the Florida Panthers last June (23rd overall). Colin Sullivan, a product of Avon Old Farms and Milford, Conn., is a strapping specimen at 6-1, 205 pounds and was drafted in the seventh round by the Montreal Canadiens. At 5-9, 178, Hopkinton’s Teddy Doherty has already shown some aptitude on the power play. Travis Jeke, a 6-2, 192-pound Pittsburgh native and Northwood product, is still looking for his first playing time this season but is expected to be part of the mix.
They are all expected to be good players for BC at some point, maybe even better than good. But they are all still freshmen, and pitfalls come with that.
“With the freshmen, it’s really difficult to morph into Hockey East,” said coach Jerry York about his team’s ultra-competitive conference. “But I think once they get the feel of all the rinks and all the different teams, they’re going to feel a lot more comfortable. They’ve started off just like I thought they would, some ups and downs, but there are certainly some signs of positive feedback watching them play in different shifts.”
Sullivan didn’t have to wait long to get his welcome-to-Hockey East moment. It came just a few shifts into his college debut at Matthews Arena on Oct. 13, with a hungry Northeastern club taking it to the Eagles. A puck ricocheted off Sullivan’s leg in the slot right to Husky Ryan Belonger, and it was quickly in the back of the BC net to give NU a lead it wouldn’t relinquish.
The freshman came to the bench and his head promptly drooped.
“To tell you the truth, the first period at Northeastern, I felt a little bit overwhelmed,” said Sullivan. “But the guys like Pat Wey and Patch Alber and my partner Isaac MacLeod kind of settled me down, telling ‘you do belong here. This happens to everybody. Everybody goes through this growing phase.’
“The veterans have been doing a phenomenal job with us freshmen, grooming us into the hockey players we’re going to become.”
That game also served as an eye-opener for Matheson. There was disappointment, to be sure, but not discouragement.
“Northeastern played a very good game, so give the credit to them, but at the same time, I don’t think we were ready to play with that intensity,” said Matheson. “So it was a little bit of a wake-up call for myself, because I had never played a college hockey game. But at the same time, we kind of walked away thinking ‘Man, we could have done better.’ ”
Fortunately for York, he’s been able to pair each one of the freshmen with an upper classmen, Doherty with senior captain Wey, Sullivan with junior MacLeod and Matheson with senior Alber.
Wey knows exactly what the first-year players are going through. He recalls, as a freshman, beating himself up after making a mistake in a game at Harvard and having an upperclassmen sit down next to him on the bus to give the quick pep talk he gave Sullivan on the bench.
“Our assistant coach (Greg) Brown has done a great job working with the young kids and we share in that development process on maybe a more personal basis than a coach would have,” said Wey, whose Eagles travel to UMass-Lowell tonight.
“And I think it’s important that we’re able to address issues that maybe they wouldn’t be comfortable asking the coaches. Like if we’ve gone over a faceoff play a number of times and you still don’t get it, you don’t want to be asking the coaches over and over again. Things like that and just opening up to them about our culture here, how we do things off the ice and how we work on the ice, what’s expected of us. Things that might not be explicit at the beginning of the year, but have been passed down to us by older guys.”
And it looks like the education is sticking. There was a marked difference between that first game at Matthews and the Eagles home opener against the Huskies last Saturday, a dominant 3-0 win.
“Breaking out pucks is going to be huge, especially when teams see that half our D corps are freshmen,” said Wey. “It’s such a big part of what’s made us successful in the past and it’s always been a cornerstone of our team. And to see that improvement that quickly was encouraging.”
While freshmen may be given a wider berth to make the mistakes that inevitably happen, youth shouldn’t have to be an impediment to success. And you only have to look at the 2009-10 BC team, which had a similarly comprised defense, to see that. The fact that the Eagles had four frosh blueliners, including Wey and Alber, didn’t keep the Eagles from winning the national championship.
And in case any of these current youngsters weren’t clear on what the ultimate goal is, they were reminded of it before Saturday’s game when last season’s championship banner was raised, with representatives from each of the five title teams on hand to witness it.
“It was unbelievable,” said Doherty, whose uncle, Marty Hughes, played on the 2001 team that ended BC’s 52-year drought. “It’s definitely motivation, and definitely something I want to do while I’m here, for sure. We’ve got a good group of guys. But we’ve got to write our own story.”
And that arduous process has just begun.
Posted: Sat Oct 20, 2012 11:18 pm