Since Lichterman left door open, Lewis has come to push it wider
By Al Daniel
If Hockey East were to seek the NHL’s expressed written consent to duplicate its 2010Stanley Cup ad campaign, one entry would most certainly run as follows:
Footage: Jennie Gallo inserts a sudden-death power play strike behind Boston University goalie Kerrin Sperry and proceeds to lead her team in a celebratory cavalry charge around the Alfond Arena ice.
Stop, rewind slowly, and cue the music.
Within seconds, as the darkening tape returns to its point of origin, a superimposed question reads: “What if Lichterman didn’t resign?”
Fade to a pitch black screen, penetrated with the superimposed slogan: “History will be made.”
Indeed, Gallo’s Senior Night overtime goal, followed by New Hampshire’s loss the following day, sealed a most historically progressive 2010-11 campaign for the Maine Black Bears. Fueled by the contagious, unrelenting hunger of first-year head coach Maria Lewis, they had defied most every pundit, preseason pollster, and laptop loiterer by stamping a playoff spot.
What’s more, they claimed that unlikely postseason passport in the most unlikely and stimulating fashion. They came back from near-elimination, on the heels of a 1-0 loss to bottom-feeder Vermont, to extract five of an eight possible points from first-round byes Boston College and BU in the final two weekends of the regular season.
The best news now for Bears buffs: Lewis is still dissatisfied. Because that playoff berth ultimately amounted to a 5-2 quarterfinal plummet in Providence, the skipper figures to fidget through her forthcoming Memorial Day, Flag Day, Independence Day, mid-August, and Labor Day barbecues as she waits to get her students cracking on a do-over in 2011-12.
“As proud as I am of what we accomplished there in those last two weeks (of the regular season), you’re only as good as your last game,” she said. “So I’m pretty disappointed with how we finished the season.
“We’ve got some kids that can play and we did what we did this year, but I really do believe you’re only as good as your last game. We didn’t play our best in the last game. That kind of changes things in my eyes.”
But beforehand, Lewis more than “kind of changed” everyone’s perception of Maine women’s hockey. Although, nobody could have faulted her had she fallen short of that, for it has literally been only a year since any impending change –for better, worse, or no effect- was apparent in this program.
Exactly one year to this date, then-third-year coach Dan Lichterman abdicated his post in Orono for what was formally publicized as a chance “to pursue other interests.” As it happened, those other interests have included coaching the CWHL’s Toronto franchise, and a Bangor newspaper did detail Lichterman’s intent to devote more time to his family. So perhaps the actual terms of his exit weren’t as suspect as some simple record-reading piranhas would like to believe.
Come what may, the Maine athletic department’s search for a successor lasted an excruciating 99 days. Fans primarily passed the time by going on chat forums to deride the Black Bears as “a glorified club program” and lament the departure of Swiss starlet Darcia Leimgruber, who due to international obligations lasted but six games during her lone year in Orono and didn’t stick around to burgeon on the college platform.
Even if neither Lichterman nor Leimgruber were involved, someone was going to have to make a lot out of diddlysquat. The status quo was simply not billeting much hope for the Mainers, whose yearly win total under Lichterman made a tortoise-paced hike from 4 to 5 to 6, and whose previous Hockey East postseason game was two coaching changes prior in 2006. Any sort of change that merely fostered the illusion of replenished relevance would be a pleasant surprise.
Lewis, formerly a volunteer assistant coach during the Black Bears’ inaugural varsity season in 1999-2000, brought that illusion right in with her when she was appointed on July 16. And she had every intention to promptly transfer the vision from her mind to the canvas.
When she both previewed and reviewed her first year, Lewis pointed to the university’s ornate history in men’s hockey and vowed not to waste a nanosecond pushing the female pucksters up to the same standard.
“This was a building year for us,” she acknowledged. “And for me, Maine shouldn’t be at the bottom of college hockey. Maine has a very proud tradition of good hockey, and I think the women’s team is on its way to backing that up on our side.”
Applying her steadfast, nothing-to-lose-and-all-to-gain attitude, Lewis has introduced an improvisational cycle of improvement and on-the-fly raising of expectations. For her pupils, the experience has become a real-life enactment of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, minus the seriocomic aggravation and plus the pleasurable purpose.
In one year, Lewis doubled the Black Bears’ 2009-10 win total to 12. She saw the defense, once notorious for routinely letting its goaltender face 40-, 50-, or even 60-plus shots, slim its final goals-against average to 2.53, the lowest since 2005-06. She monitored a strike force that retained a median of 2.32 goals per night, its best since the year before Lichterman’s arrival in 2007.
More critically, a whopping 10 veteran skaters cultivated a career high in single-season points. Seven of them elevated their goal-scoring output, including three who broke double digits for the first time.
Top gun sophomore Brittany Dougherty went from a 3-6-9 freshman log to a 14-12-26. Her 14 goals tied her for the team lead with Gallo and junior Myriam Crousette, who had tallied a cumulative 12 goals over her first two seasons. Danielle Ward, a junior transfer from Division III Southern Maine, rounded out the four double-digit goal-getters with 11 strikes.
“Offensively, going into the season, I didn’t know who was going to put the puck in the net,” said Lewis. “We had pretty much graduated all of our scoring other than Gallo. So to have four kids over 20 points, I think that says a lot about our whole team top-to-bottom.”
As it happens, Gallo was the only 2011 graduate to tune the mesh at all in her senior campaign. Jordan Colliton was an anomaly on her club with a down year, notching merely four assists, and the other seniors –Danielle Cyr, Madelene Eriksson, and Kaitlin Zeek- were about as barren as they were in their previous years.
Conversely, as many as 16 skaters who combined for 65 strikes and 105 helpers in 2010-11 will be coming back for more in September.
And Lewis will doubtlessly expect more of them, both in terms of total output and a broader stylistic variety of attacks. In particular, she still wants a deeper moat on the defensive end to keep cutting back on the goals-against average and to foster a more formidable, consistent transition game.
“Our D-zone coverage, sometimes it’s pretty sharp and we break out pretty well. And other times our kids are like turnstiles,” she said. “They get a little lost out there. That’s something we’ve been a bit inconsistent with.
“When we’re playing well, we’re very good in our D-zone, we break out well and we’re able to establish things offensively. When we’re not playing well, we really struggle in that zone and obviously next year that really has to get cleaned up. But to watch our D grow this year, they started doing some things that I was really happy with.”
Could they have started any such things in a fourth year under Lichterman? Or would they have just settled for another ritual burial in the pile of stocky Hockey East mid-to-heavyweights and defined progress as a seven-win season?
Theoretically –whether they were pressing on with Lichterman or transitioning to Lewis’ system of sustainable development- the Black Bears had just as much chance of retracting what negligible ice they had already covered.
But instead of dreaming about seven overall wins and/or seventh place in Hockey East, as some Mainers may have been at this time in 2010, they are now thirsting for 13 overall wins. Maybe even more. And maybe home ice for the Hockey East wild card, and maybe a journey to the semis after that.
The fans are free to say so because, hey, the boss says so.
“I am proud of the team,” Lewis said. “I do think that we made tremendous strides this year. I do think that we’re not going to sneak up on anybody anymore. We’ve proven that we belong in Hockey East, so I am very proud of that.
“But in order to have true success, you have to be able to carry that over into the playoffs. And I won’t truly be fully satisfied with the season until we do that. We’re going to have to wait another year.”
She added, “I’m proud that we got this far, but it’s just not good enough. We have to develop.”
Exactly the perennial message before and after Lichterman left a year ago. Only now, the ever-candid database says that development is really happening.
Al Daniel is the Hockey East correspondent to Beyond The Dashers
No comments:
Post a Comment