After a season with a less-than-ideal record and a championship tournament on home ice that left Oregon in the dust, the Oregon club hockey team hopes to find some positives to carry over to next season.
“The team has been through a season where two-thirds of the team were rookies,” said head coach Garreth MacDonald, who finished his second year with the Ducks. “This season turned out to be more of a rebuilding season than what we hoped.
“The feedback I’ve gotten from teams that have beat us is that we have an impressive bunch of young players who have the potential to dominate the league in a few years.”
Defenseman Jesse Cohen, who leaves the Ducks this spring, agreed: “We are a lot better team than the stats say.”
Although the majority of the defensive line is graduating, more than 60 percent of the team members are rookies, and a large group of players plans on returning.
MacDonald will use the off-season to reflect on what this season was supposed to be and wasn’t, he said. From there, he will try to find the elements that were missing.
Switching lines and systems all the time until the last half of the season certainly did not work, he said. But with a fresh team, this was unavoidable in testing where the chemistry between players and systems mixed.
“We’re not quite back to square one,” MacDonald said. “We’ll be on square two next season.”
The off-season is also a time when the players can work on their basic fitness and conditioning.
“We lost the game on Friday because we died after two periods,” Cohen said.
MacDonald agrees: “We meet when school starts in September, and then we’ve got two weeks to get ready.”
The coach will encourage his players to work on their skills during the summer and go to the gym regularly to get the physical training they need to be ready for action once school starts again.
Graduating captain Tyler Shaffar estimates that the Ducks will need at least two good seasons of recruiting to make up for the graduating class.
“It will be rough for them to make up,” Shaffar said, referring to the six defensemen who are leaving, in addition to himself and the main goalie, Josh Hardin. Shaffar thinks some of the biggest shoes to fill are those of Hardin.
“Joe [Fagliano] will have to get up to Josh’s level real quick to raise the game to another notch,” Shaffar said.
Each month, MacDonald receives between six and 10 e-mails from prospective students with questions about the hockey program. These are mainly students who have seen the Web site, he said.
Additionally, MacDonald has been in contact with several amateur league coaches. Amateur coaches know and coach players who would like to stay in Oregon and are excited about an opportunity to play competitive hockey while pursuing an education, he said. No other Oregon university has a hockey program.
Finally, MacDonald is looking forward to more assistant coaching help next season. Defenseman Larry Platzke, who is leaving the team as a player, has indicated he would coach defense.
“I’ll have some help on the bench, which is what I need,” MacDonald said.