The first month of the season wasn’t necessarily the best of times for the Union hockey program.
The Garnet Chargers had a new logo, a new name and a new identity, but they also had four losses in their first six games. They’d been wildly inconsistent in their results, and they bookended flashy scoring in their two wins with a number of high-goal scores in their losses. The nadir came on Nov. 3 when their longtime rival at Rensselaer tallied eight goals in a wild 8-6 win.
For coach Josh Hauge, the results didn’t match his team’s capability. He’d seen his team invest the requisite time and energy to play hockey at a high level, and his first full offseason at the Achilles Center built an opportunity for Union to layer more success on top of last year’s eighth-place finish. Having interacted with his team on a daily basis, he knew there was more to it than those early losses showed.
He just needed some wins to support the argument, and after that 8-6 loss to the Engineers, Union started to draw a clear line of delineation. A 2-6-0 hockey team promptly won four of its next five games before swamping Princeton with a 7-2 win, and prior to Wednesday night’s game against Maine (a 3-1 loss), the team that christened a new day with its new branding is poised to enter the second half of the season as a sleeper team capable of upending the current ECAC order.
“Our guys started to figure out what they needed to do to be successful,” Hauge said of last month’s success. “And they started following their leadership group. Our leaders have done an amazing job, and when you look at Ben Tupker, Tyler Watkins and Chaz Smedsrud and the job they’ve done in leading this group, it’s pretty impressive. I think they’re just starting to gain confidence, and we’re just starting to hit our stride as a team.”
It’s ironic that Union would have been considered an inconsistent team in those early games because of the statistical consistency that emerged in November, but the team that was nearly identical on shots to St. Lawrence in a one-goal game generated more chances against Stonehill and Princeton in three other, more lopsided wins. It fell in line with a season-long trend where a team that’s a game over .500 both averages and surrenders around 3.5 goals per game with 30.5 shots on either end.
The Garnet Chargers were simply better when they successfully tilted game situations in their favor, but if that’s an obvious statement to make, it’s also one that’s backed up a hard-working roster attempting to play a two-way game. Flipping the switch to winning games didn’t require one specific moment or performance, but it did utilize a culture that was built on continuing to press forward by managing its emotions through both highs and lows.
“I think we’ve seen [the culture] shift to where hockey becomes really important to our guys here,” Hauge said. “We’re on trimesters at Union, so our year goes a little bit longer, but the guys didn’t miss a lift and didn’t miss a skate, and we still practiced a couple of days per week [during the offseason]. When we were able to get on the ice with the guys, it wasn’t the same as a regular practice because it became more about small games and competing and skills development, but that showed how hard they worked in the spring and how that translated into the summer.”
That shift hasn’t translated to a significant move up the ECAC standings yet, but the nine-point output is tied for seventh place with St. Lawrence and Brown while standing one point behind Dartmouth and two points behind Princeton with games in hand. The three-point deficit to Colgate and Cornell includes two games to make up against both teams, but the second half of the season also has the Garnet Chargers avoiding consecutive weekends on the road.
Defenseman John Prokop leads the league with 14 assists and is the only non-Quinnipiac player with at least 15 points on the season. Chaz Smedsrud’s six goals are tied for ninth in the league while Carter Korpi sits one spot behind him with five goals, but both are rated in the league’s top-15 with about a half-goal produced per game.
Chauvette is one of three goalies with at least 300 saves this season, and the team in front of him is both third in the league for assists per game and second in points per game as a combined roster. The offense is scoring at a 12 percent clip on its shots, which is second to Quinnipiac, and both the power play and the penalty kill are among the league’s best with a penalty kill rated as one of the nation’s overall top units at 92.9 percent – or one-tenth lower than Quinnipiac’s 93 percent.
“We’ve been trying to win with depth,” Hauge said. “That’s an area where we have a lot of guys that can contribute and chip in. We want to play with pace, so we want everyone on our roster to have the confidence that they can make a play, but if we’re not going to get the puck bounces or something, they’re also not going to lose their mind. We know that everyone is going to backcheck as hard for us if they make a mistake, and that’s the attitude that we’re competing hard, that every player brings value to our team.”
