Tempers have been hot and flaring in Hanover over the past week. Some of that heat will reach Thompson Arena this weekend when the Dartmouth College women's hockey team tackles one of its biggest weekends of the season in hopes of securing home-ice advantage in the hotly-contested ECAC playoff race.
The Big Green will take on cellar-dwellar Colby on Saturday afternoon before meeting cross-state rival New Hampshire on Sunday.
Dartmouth will enter the weekend in seventh place in the conference standings, just two points above the final playoff spot held by Cornell, but only seven points away from second-place Brown.
With six league games remaining on their campaign, the Big Green,11-5-4 ECAC, has 26 points.
Harvard sits in the league lead with 37 points, followed by Brown with 33 and Northeastern with 31. New Hampshire is in fourth place tallying 29, while Providence is fifth with 28 and Princeton is sixth with 27 points.
"We feel like we control our own destiny," Dartmouth head coach Judy Parish said. "If we win these games we have a good shot at home ice, which is a great motivator."
Back in January, the Big Green and the Wildcats tied 3-3 on the campus of UNH in Durham.
"Last time we played them, we definitely dominated most of the game and were playing in their end for a good amount of time," Lauren Trottier '01 said. "We really had them on the run and we could tell that they were getting frustrated and didn't know what to do with the puck sometimes."
With a sweep this weekend, the Big Green will be in position to contend for a third- or fourth-place finish in the league standings. Their final four games are against teams in the top five in the ECAC standings so they control their own destiny in terms of how high they finish.
The Big Green should take care of the White Mules on Sunday as Colby has struggled enormously in its first year in Divison I hockey. Perennial powerhouse New Hampshire could be a different story.
"Even though it was great to tie them, we want more and feel that we are a better team and should be able to beat them," Trottier said. "Last game we had a ton of opportunities to score, so this time we'll just have to go hard to the net and finish every play with a burning desire to score."
Before Saturday's game, the Hockey Humanitarian Award Foundation will present Dartmouth senior forward Sara Nelson with recognition of her selection as a 1999 finalist for the award.
The award is given annually to the man or woman who is deemed college hockey's finest citizen.
The other four finalists are Jamie Daniel Baby of the University of Alabama-Huntsville, Pete Gardiner of Rensselaer, Kristine Price of the Rochester Institute of Technology, and Ryan Reinheller of the University of Alaska/Fairbanks.
