As another season comes to a close, the key thing to consider for the Carleton women’s team is progress.
The team finished the season with a 5-15 mark, two more wins than last year, and a last-place finish in the Réseau du sport étudiant du Québec (RSEQ) division.
However, the women finished strong by concluding the 2015-2016 season with two straight victories, including a 4-3 shootout win over crosstown rival the University of Ottawa.
Despite the last-place finish, this season saw a major improvement defensively for the Ravens.
The team allowed 33 less goals than it had the previous year, earning second-year goaltender Katelyn Steele RSEQ second-team all-star honours.
With impressive strides made in their own end, head coach Pierre Alain said he now turns his focus to goal scoring.
Alain said he was impressed with how his team defended this season but “would have liked to be more of a threat on offence.”
The team only managed to score a conference-low 23 goals in its 20-game season.
“Our biggest struggle this year was scoring goals and crashing the net because we were not willing to pay the price every single shift to be successful,” said team captain Tawnya Guindon.
She said was impressed with team cohesion this year but did not see as much confidence on the ice as she would have liked.
“There were many close games this year that we could have won if we had more resiliency and confidence,” she said, “but we let them slip away from us, which cost us in the end to make playoffs.”
She said her personal highlight of the year is a 1-0 victory over McGill—the first win against the second-place Martlets in five years.
Guindon said she understands the fact that the program is in the midst of a “ground-up” reconstruction, and is impressed with the improvements that her team has made this season.
This year’s squad featured 16 freshmen, the most of any team in the conference. This is a result of the program being in its second year of rebuilding under Alain, who came over from Hockey Canada to take the helm.
Therefore, he said inexperience was expected. Among the 16 first-years, forward Nicole Miners shone. The first-year art major tallied 10 points in her rookie campaign, the most on the team and a record for any first year player in Carleton women’s history.
This year’s team improved in many ways, and Guindon said they are all looking forward to making next season the program’s long-awaited first trip to the Canadian Interuniversity Sport National Championships.
“The program has made a big step forward,” Alain said.
