Photo courtesy Quinnipiac Athletics
By: Matt McAuliffe
On Friday night, two unbeaten teams squared off between the Quinnipiac women’s ice hockey team and the University of Connecticut Huskies. Last time these teams played each other Quinnipiac defeated Connecticut 1-0, so getting revenge was on the Huskies mind.
In the first period, the Huskies came out strong battling the third best team in the nation. UConn held Quinnipiac to only seven shots in the first period. Emma Woods was able to score a power play goal with less than a minute left to give the Bobcats an early lead. UConn came out looking stronger and more aggressive than expected in the first.
Turner was impressed with UConn’s first period performance. “I think they outplayed us. It was a really good moment for our team to wake up a little bit. We’re the team that’s usually the hard to play against team. We’re the team that usually wins those battles, and we didn’t in the first period.”
Chris MacKenzie commented on his team’s performance in the first period as well.
“We really wanted to make them dump the puck and try to get a first attempt on the breakout. We assigned a checking line to Cianfarano and Samoskevich, and we kept them off the scoring sheet.”
The second period was similar to the first as both teams stayed strong defensively as there were no goals scored. But, there were many of penalties. The Bobcats had 12 penalty minutes in the second period alone and UConn had eight penalty minutes in the second period as well. No power play goals were scored for both teams. With lack of success on the power play for Quinnipiac, there came success in the penalty kill.
“I was really happy with our penalty kill. A lot of our details and controlled moments that we were looking for were very good,” said Cassandra Turner.
The three period started similar to the second period as it was tight defensively. As the period went on the Quinnipiac offense had another spark as Raquel Pennoyer scored off a rebound for the Bobcats. Then, to top it off, Cianfarano popped in an empty netter to solidify a 3-0 win. Cassandra Turner said, “We wanted to be confident in the third period. We knew we needed to be sound defensively, but confident with the puck and I think we saw that. Leading into our second goal we had about four or five shifts in a row where we just dominated and dictated the pace.”
The undefeated Bobcats hope to continue the win streak as they travel to Durham, New Hampshire to take on the University of New Hampshire Wildcats Saturday, Oct. 8 in a game originally scheduled for 2 p.m., but is now at 3 p.m.
