The Vermont Catamounts are short on bodies, with a maximum of 16 skaters available at any given time. They have been egregiously short on depth, being the last Hockey East team to finally have a point-getter vault over double digits (Celeste Doucet). And with a 1-6-4 Hockey East record, and seeing as all of their conference cohabitants have at least one game in hand, they are short on time in the hunt for the program’s coveted first playoff passport.
What they patently don’t lack, however, is experience –what with six rostered seniors and two juniors constituting half of the skaters’ stock. And given that, up to this point, nearly all of their experience has been akin to valiantly slogging up the Green Mountains on a treacherous winter day and then finding that the cozy lodge closed its doors to new visitors several hours ago, the veterans ought to have no dearth of hunger.
No one personifies the active struggle more than point-based puckslinger Peggy Wakeham. And if there is to be any turning point in yet another cramming session for this beleaguered bunch, it might as well be last Saturday’s 3-3 knot with nationally-ranked North Dakota.
Not only did the Catamounts delete three deficits en route to an intangible but invaluable nonconference point. Wakeham had a hand in all three retaliatory strikes, effectively shattering her career-worst 13-game pointless streak. To find her name on any other recent scoresheet, you would have to reel back to the night before Halloween, when she ended a four-game goal-scoring streak in 4-1 loss at Northeastern.
With her goal and two assists against the Sioux, Wakeham is now tied with her classmate Doucet for the all-time scoring lead among active Catamounts. They each boast 45 points in their respective careers. And her five goals on the year place her second on the team this season behind sophomore Erin Wente, who has tuned the mesh six times.
And though Wakeham is No. 5 on Vermont’s 2010-11 scoring chart with seven points, she and Doucet are tied for second on the team with four power play points apiece. Only junior Kailey Nash has been more fruitful during 5-on-4 segments, having nailed six of her eight points on the power play this season. Saturday was only the second time the Catamounts have converted two opportunities in a game, and Wakeham assisted on both conversions.
Wakeham’s overall posture raises inevitable questions as to what might have been were it not for the frostbite that stretched consistently from Halloween, all through the December deceleration, and into the week after New Year’s. Her previous precedent says she should have already become the first Catamount to notch 50 career points. And with one more scorer and/or playmaker on track and leading by example, only the hockey gods know how many of Vermont’s nine ties on the year could have been wins.
A night like last Saturday is hardly an anomaly for Wakeham. She charged up six multi-point outings during her sophomore campaign, including two playmaker hat tricks. Four of those six games were winning causes for a team that ultimately finished with a 7-25-2 transcript. But after a 6-16-22 scoring log that year, she receded for her junior year and the better part of this season. Head coach Tim Bothwell can only hope his top blueliner’s old groove is planning to stay this time. And he should hope that if Wakeham keeps up her revival, Teddy Fortin, Saleah Morrison, Chelsea Rapin, and Hannah Westbrook will follow suit.
Not to be completely eclipsed in a timely return to relevance, Doucet whittled herself two assists last Saturday and bears 1-4-5 totals in the last three ventures after a seven-game pointless streak and only one point in 12 appearances to curtain the first half. Meanwhile, Rapin found the net after she was barren in all but one of her previous 11 games, the exception being a goal-assist value pack in a vital 4-3 overtime win over Maine Dec. 4.
All three players will need to perform to at least a semi-comparable degree in the 10 conference games that remain. Two of the more winnable matches lie straight ahead in this weekend’s two-night visit to Connecticut and nothing less than a sweep will do for Vermont. UConn leads the Catamounts by three Hockey East points and has two games in hand, thus the only practical option is to vault over the Huskies –albeit with only a one-point gap- and dare them to make up that ground.
Assuming last-place New Hampshire is still floundering in mid-February, the Catamounts will also have to ensure they win that two-game wishbone (Feb. 11-12) for good measure.
To make that happen, and to filch from any of the bigwigs if given the opportunity (such things have happened before), it’s on all of the seniors to kindle everyone’s emotion in the locker room. And it’s on all of them –but particularly Wakeham, owing to her two-way credentials and her foundation from Saturday- to catalyze the crunch on the ice.
Al Daniel is the Hockey East correspondent to Beyond the Dashers
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