In a weekend road swing through frigid upstate New York, the women’s hockey team captured its first win of the season on Saturday, knocking off a tough Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute team by two goals. Powered by a phenomenal performance from goaltender and co-captain Lindsay Holdcroft ’14, the Big Green (1-4, 1-3 ECAC) snapped a four-game slide that had started the season on a negative note, showing impressive resilience to rebound from a Friday night loss to Union College.
“It was really important to get that first win,” forward Karlee Odland ’15 said. “Going into the weekend it was a monkey on our backs, not having that first win. Just by getting that we will be able to play with more confidence.”
On Friday night, the weekend did not appear to be one that would help the Big Green break out of its early season slump. Facing a Union (4-6, 1-1 ECAC) team that had lost its two previous games, the Big Green struggled to find offensive cohesion, failing to find the back of the net for the first time this season.
“Union is the kind of team that will collapse defensively, and we had trouble penetrating through them collapsing,” co-captain Ali Winkel ’14 said. “It was one of those games where we weren’t getting the right balance.”
Across lines, the Big Green failed to find a rhythm against Union. Despite outshooting the Dutchmen by a substantial margin, the Big Green could not find a way to beat standout sophomore goaltender Shenae Lundberg, who ended the night with 25 saves.
“We ran into a hot goalie, and Union was very disciplined defensively, so we did get a little frustrated offensively,” Odland said.
Adding insult to injury, the Big Green had never lost to Union before this weekend. In all past competitions against Union, the Big Green had garnered 20 wins with no losses or ties. In addition, the Big Green had never conceded more than two goals to the Dutchmen.
“A few of us kind of knew about it — the upperclassmen definitely knew, but we didn’t tell the freshmen,” Winkel said. “We didn’t think it was that important and we didn’t want to put more pressure on them. But it was definitely in the back of our minds and made us a little more determined to try and get the win.”
Regrouping after the tough loss, the young Big Green squad focused on learning important lessons from the matchup against Union. After all, Saturday brought a difficult matchup against Rensselaer (2-6-1, 1-1-0 ECAC), who came into the game having knocked off nationally-ranked No.7 Harvard University the night before.
“We’re a young team, and I think we learned against Union that we can’t take teams lightly,” Winkel said. “We have to bring our best game to every game.”
Against Rensselaer, the Big Green jumped out to an early lead behind a first-period marker from Winkel, and never looked back on the way to a vitally important win, the first of the season. While Rensselaer kept things interesting by tying the game in the second period, the Big Green clicked offensively and dominated on the power play, denying Rensselaer four times after penalties while finding the net on the power play once.
Defensively, the Big Green was aided by a strong performance from Holdcroft, who ended the game with a save percentage of .971, a season-high. Holdcroft had 33 saves on the evening.
“Winning, and being able to win by a couple of goals, was really exciting,” Winkel said.
Looking ahead, the Big Green will hope to carry the momentum from its first win into next weekend’s ECAC matchups against Clarkson University and the University of St. Lawrence. The Big Green will once again travel away from the friendly confines of Hanover for those games.
“Next weekend is definitely huge,” Holdcroft said. “I think we’re really going to try and build off what we did against RPI, try to play good defense and have offense take care of itself. By scoring three goals, we have some nice momentum. So I think we’re going to keep doing that, work on the little things, and keep a positive attitude.”
