The Carleton men’s hockey team wrapped up pre-season play Oct. 4-5 defeating the Dalhousie University Tigers 7-3, followed by a 4-2 loss to the St. Lawrence University Saints.
The Ravens competed at the Ice House for the first time this season when they hosted the Tigers Oct. 4.
Carleton appeared dominant from the start with a goal by third-year defenceman Tim Billingsley less than a minute into the game.
The Ravens ended the first period with a 2-0 lead after a goal by fourth-year forward Joe Pleckaitis at 18:42 and continued their strong play until the final buzzer.
“I thought we played a lot better than last week,” first-year defenceman Owen Werthner said, who had two goals in the Ravens win. “We built off what we learned, even from the first period. On breakouts, we were making tape-to-tape crisp passes.”
Carleton’s rookies shone in the extremely physical match, notching five of the Ravens’ seven goals.
First-year defenceman Jake Cardwell scored two goals just 13 seconds apart from each other at the start of the second. In the same shift, he left the game from an undisclosed injury and did not return for the next game against the Saints.
Dalhousie recorded 24 penalty minutes in the match, nearly doubling the Ravens’ 14 minutes spent in the box.
“It’s tough sometimes, when the other team doesn’t seem like they want to play, they just seem like they want to hurt you a little bit,” first-year forward Michael McNamee said, who added a second period goal for Carleton. “But we have guys who can deal with that . . . we try to stick to our game as much as we can.”
The following day, the Ravens travelled to Canton, N.Y. to take on the Saints in their final game of the pre-season.
Jeff Hayes opened up the scoring for Carleton in the first period at 11:28 to put the team up 1-0. The Ravens were unable to hold onto the lead and found themselves down 3-1 midway through the third.
A goal by Carleton’s Mitch Porowski at 9:43 in the third period, assisted by Hayes, spurred hopes of a Ravens’ comeback. Those hopes were diminished when the Saints scored an empty net goal in the last minute of play.
“St. Lawrence really took it to us in the first period in terms of pace and the intensity,” Ravens head coach Marty Johnston said. “We converted on a lot of our scoring chances on Friday night and I think that maybe we weren’t as prepared as we needed to be to face a team that hadn’t played a game yet this year and were very eager.”
The Ravens finished the pre-season with a 2-2 record. Carleton will open their regular season on the road with two back-to-back games against the Windsor University Lancers Oct. 11-12.
“It’s going to be a really tough test,” Johnston said. “Windsor’s been one of the premier teams in the Western Conference the past two or three years, so we feel like we have a big challenge ahead. But we’re excited about playing one of the best teams in the OUA.”
