Men's Hockey - Brice Alaska Goal Rush (16/17 Oct)

Right off a big upset of #1 Boston College, the Engineers were off to Alaska for a pair of games against the two teams from the Last Frontier. 0-3 all time against those schools on their home turf, RPI did quite a bit to put themselves into a position to succeed on both nights, but couldn't follow through, as uneven play and penalties in the third periods against both the Seawolves and the Nanooks doomed the Engineers to move to 0-5 against Alaskan teams in Alaska, falling 4-3 to UAA on Friday and 4-2 to UAF on Saturday.

Alaska-Anchorage
Liljegren-Bubela-Ohrvall
Melanson-Tironese-Nanne
Bourbonnais-Schroeder-Gillespie
Wood-Fulton-Clary

Bradley-Prapavessis
Wilson-Reno
Moore-Hampton

Kasdorf

A fast-paced but even first period between the Engineers and Seawolves was mostly a feeling-out for both teams, the first whistle not coming until the period was nearly half over. Shots were only 10-9 in favor of UAA, but the Seawolves earned the game's first goal with about five and a half minutes left in the opening frame as UAA's Dylan Hubbs scored to put the nominal home side ahead 1-0.

The second period was much more to RPI's liking, a dominant period for the Engineers that saw them taking a lead into the final 20. Evan Tironese scored his first collegiate goal five minutes into the second to tie the game, striking on a great give-and-go with linemate Lou Nanne. Not long after Tironese's goal, UAA began getting into a bit of penalty trouble, taking a tripping call and a kneeing call for back-to-back man advantage opportunities for the Engineers. Late in the latter penalty, RPI got a glimpse of the future as Meirs Moore, competing in his first collegiate game on the blue line as the Engineers' power play quarterback of the future, notched his first college goal to put RPI ahead 2-1.

RPI came out slow for the third period and they paid for it almost immediately. Austin Azurdia took advantage of an opening to tie the game at two just 1:24 into the third period. Seconds later, A hooking penalty to Milos Bubela put RPI on the penalty kill, a place they'd been with some frequency starting just a minute after Moore's goal had put them ahead. The Bubela penalty was killed off, and Bubela himself would score during a penalty kill minutes later to give RPI the lead back at 3-2. But a march to the box that included Nanne and Tironese gave UAA an opening, and during a 4-on-3 on Fairbanks' Olympic-sized ice surface, Seawolves freshman Wyatt Ege struck to tie the score, then just three minutes later hit again with a laser of a shot that put UAA up for good at 4-3.

Kasdorf was pulled for the final 1:15, but RPI could not find the tying goal, and despite a solid early 40 minutes, the Engineers had to swallow a loss due to poorly timed penalties and an overall sub-par effort in the final period.

Alaska
Liljegren-Bubela-Wood
Nanne-Tironese-Ohrvall
Bourbonnais-Schroeder-Gillespie
Melanson-Fulton-Clary

Bradley-Prapavessis
Wilson-Reno
Moore-Hampton

Kasdorf

Fresh off a solid performance against UAA, Jake Wood was graduated to the top line, while Drew Melanson, who has struggled to find his pace early this season, was moved to the grind line. With both Alaska schools winning on Friday night, the title was definitively out of reach, but RPI still had their sights set on what could have at least been a worthwhile victory.

The Engineers were the ones who pounced on Saturday night against the actual hosts. An early penalty against the Nanooks was cashed in on quickly by Riley Bourbonnais, who netted his team-leading third goal of the season just six seconds into the man advantage off a faceoff win by Tironese to put RPI up 1-0 3:25 into the game. Five and a half minutes later, Wood scored his first of the year on a shorthanded breakaway. With Zach Schroeder off for tripping, a UAF shot was blocked at the blue line and Wood pounced on it, giving him a long breakaway that he put home to put the Engineers up 2-0 nine minutes into the game.

From there, however, it was a slow bleed for RPI. The Nanooks had two power play chances late in the first period, including one that carried over into the second. The Engineers eventually went 6-for-6 on the penalty kill, but the penalties certainly helped swing momentum at inopportune times. The carried-over penalty helped UAF establish control early in the second period, and the home team cut the lead in half with a goal by Tayler Munson at 5:30 of the middle frame.

Another RPI penalty early in the third period set the table for the tying goal. While the Nanooks didn't score on the tripping penalty to Jared Wilson, they did put one past Jason Kasdorf 10 seconds after the penalty expired, so it's not too much of a stretch to say that the penalty at least put them in a good spot to create a scoring opportunity. Colton Sparrow's first goal of the season tied the game up, then UAF took the lead on a 4-on-4 tally four and a half minutes later as Peter Krieger scored his first of the year.

RPI looked fairly beaten at that point, even just down a goal. The Nanooks poured on the shots all night long, especially in the third period where Kasdorf made an incredible 21 saves to keep the Engineers alive. They were given a golden opportunity with 1:46 left as Zach Frye took a roughing call for UAF, but with Kasdorf out of the net on the ensuing draw in the Nanooks zone, UAF won the faceoff and proceeded to shoot the puck the length of the ice and directly into the net for the 4-2 win on Munson's second goal of the night.

Kasdorf finished with a career-high 47 saves on 49 shots, an effort that led to his being named goaltender of the tournament despite RPI's two losses.

The Engineers will be looking for a bit of home-cooking and perhaps a bit of whatever magic they had against Boston College as they come home to face another Power 5 conference ranked opponent in Michigan. It should be a raucous crowd at least for Saturday, as the game is expected to be sold out. It's not a must win by any stretch of the imagination, but they're going to have to show a little more heart up front against a top-level opponent.

RPI vs. Alaska-Anchorage
Non-conference Game - Carlson Center (Fairbanks, AK)
10/16/15 - 8:00pm

RESULT: Alaska-Anchorage 4, RPI 3

BOX SCORES
College Hockey Stats
USCHO

RECAPS
RPI
Troy Record
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
KTUU-TV

RECORD: 1-2-0

RPI at Alaska
Non-conference Game - Carlson Center (Fairbanks, AK)
10/17/15 - 11:00pm

RESULT: Alaska 4, RPI 2

BOX SCORES
College Hockey Stats
USCHO

RECAPS
RPI
Troy Record
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

RECORD: 1-3-0

Upcoming games
24 Oct - #11 Michigan
30 Oct - at #18 Union
31 Oct - #18 Union (Black Saturday)
06 Nov - at Clarkson
07 Nov - at #17 St. Lawrence

North of 60

And here... we... go.

The season's fully open now, and it's time to get rolling. Tonight and tomorrow, the women face off with a Robert Morris team that was thrashed by Colgate twice two weeks ago. That would be the same Colgate that claimed the last playoff spot last season. Where are the Engineers now? Well, a couple of wins over the Colonials would go a long way to proving that they're going to be in the mix when February rolls around.

The men, meanwhile, embark on their longest possible road-trip as they take a trip to the Last Frontier to showdown with the two Alaska schools in the annual Brice Alaska Goal Rush in Fairbanks. Only about 9 1/2 hours of daylight this time of year in central Alaska, and RPI's going to want to offer even less to opposing snipers if they're going to earn their first bit of hardware since the '14 Mayor's Cup (and first tournament win since the final RPI Tournament in 2010 - which would be the first trophy from outside the Capital District since the '95 ECAC crown).

Last week's win over Boston College and the women's sweep of RIT was meaningless if RPI can't build upon that experience as we start to approach the first league games. It's time to open fire.

Know Your Enemy: Alaska

There are only a handful of current NCAA Division I teams that the Engineers have never beaten. There's the group of four that they've never even played (Canisius, Penn State, Nebraska-Omaha, and Northern Michigan). They haven't beaten Colorado College in seven tries. All three games against Ohio State have been ties. And then there's the host team of the Brice Alaska Goal Rush, who have only stared down RPI twice in their 30+ year modern history. This year, the Engineers head to Fairbanks to take on the Nanooks, carrying with them a pair of Swedish players who first acclimated to North American hockey in that very city just under 200 miles from the Arctic Circle.

Alaska
Nickname: Nanooks
Location: Fairbanks, AK
Founded: 1917
Conference: WCHA
National Championships: 0
Last NCAA Appearance: 2010
Last Frozen Four: None
Coach: Dallas Ferguson (8th season)
2014-15 Record: 19-13-2 (14-12-2 WCHA, 4th place)
Series: UAF leads, 1-0-1
First Game: November 28, 1986 (Troy, NY)
Last RPI win: Never
Last UAF win: November 28, 1986 (Troy, NY)

2015-16 game: October 17, 2015 (Fairbanks, AK)

Key players: D Josh Atkinson, sr.; F Alec Hajdukovich, sr.; F Nolan Huysmans, sr.; F Tyler Morley, sr.; F Marcus Basara, jr.; F Shawn Hochhausen, jr.; G Davis Jones, jr.; F Brandon Morley, jr.; D Zach Frye, so.; F Peter Krieger, so; F Tayler Munson, so.; F Austin Vieth, so.; F Jasen Fernsler, fr.; D Nik Koberstein, fr.; F Chad Staley, fr.

"Alaska" is actually the University of Alaska Fairbanks if we're getting hypertechnical. It's a source of some friction between the younger but larger UAA that the school chose to drop the name of their city when it came to identifying their sports teams in 2006 (leading to the somewhat demeaning sobriquet "UA_"). The move emphasized UAF's position as the University of Alaska system's flagship campus, as it was established well before statehood as the Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines, opening for classes in 1922. Understandably, it was a fairly small school, as more people lived in Troy at the time than lived in all of the vast territory of Alaska.

Considering the small size of the population base and the very small size of the school - there was a grand total of one graduate in 1923 - it's pretty impressive that the hockey program at UAF got its start in 1926. There are plenty of teams in the Lower 48 who can't claim a lineage that goes back that far. UAF was certainly not your average college hockey team. Given that there were no other colleges for well over a thousand miles (and before the advent of improved road or air travel), the school's hockey team, when they assembled one, typically played other amateur teams from the Fairbanks area.

After a four-game season in 1926, the school's team returned in 1933, playing through the Great Depression and into 1941, shuttering for World War II and returning in 1950. The squad had an on-and-off existence throughout the 50s, not getting any firm establishment until Bill Daltri took over the program in 1960. Daltri coached the Nanooks for three years, leading them to 14 wins in 16 games in 1961, the first season in which the team played more than six games in a single campaign since they had a 16-game sechedule in 1933. Overall, Daltri led the Nanooks to a 32-3-1 record in his three years as coach, including a perfect 8-0 record in 1963. Following Daltri's reign, UAF returned to playing shorter schedules with less success for the remainder of the 1960s and into the 1970s.

The modern era of Nanooks hockey undoubtedly begins in the same season as their arch-rivals from Anchorage: 1980-81. While the Seawolves found success playing in the Anchorage Senior League, the Nanooks had a dreadful first two seasons. Not only did Fairbanks lose all eight games they played against Anchorage, they lost all 22 games on their schedule, and went 2-21-0 the following season. By 1983, however, coach Ric Schafer had the squad pointed in the right direction. In the three years leading up to the founding of the Great West Hockey Conference, UAF had three winning seasons and a pair of 20-win campaigns. He guided the team to two more 20-win seasons in the GWHC before he left to take over the program at Notre Dame.

Schafer's replacement was a young coach starting his very first head coaching gig: Don Lucia. The current leader of the Minnesota Golden Gophers got his start in Fairbanks in 1987, leading the Nanooks to their first and only GWHC title in 1988 and guiding the team to .500 or better records in five of his six seasons, including a number of years where the team were independents again after the GWHC's demise.

Lucia left for Colorado College in 1993, shortly after the independent bid to the NCAA tournament was scotched without the Nanooks having ever achieved it, always having been blocked by their nemesis to the south, UAA. The team did, however, become associate members of the CCHA that season, finally slotting into an established college hockey conference for the first time. They became full members in time for the 1995-96 season.

The CCHA wasn't nearly as dog-eat-dog as the WCHA, so the Nanooks' experience wasn't quite as difficult as UAA's was in that league, but they still struggled to make an impact. In the mid-to-late 1990s, UAF lost at least 20 games in each of Dave Laurion's five years behind the bench within the CCHA.

UAF's first major nibble of success came after the accession of another young, dashing coach working his first head coaching gig in college hockey. Guy Gadowsky took a couple of seasons to get the Nanooks back on track - he won only 15 games in his first two seasons - but in 2002 UAF had their first 20-win campaign since joining the CCHA. They finished in the top half of the league standings for the first time with a 4th place showing and they advanced to the CCHA's Super Six tournament in Detroit, where they fell 6-5 in overtime against Ohio State.

Gadowsky's star was rising, but he took that star to Princeton (and eventually, Penn State) in 2004. Tavis MacMillan, an alum who had been associated with the team for over a decade, took over and brought the Nanooks to the CCHA Semifinals in 2005, but resigned due to family concerns in 2007. That led into a single tumultuous season under the tutelage of Doc DelCastillo, who eventually resigned before being fired thanks in part to an alleged team revolt and allegations of sexual harassment.

Current head coach Dallas Ferguson took over from DelCastillo in 2008, and in just his second season behind the bench, guided the Nanooks to their first ever NCAA tournament bid, making Alaska the next-to-last team from the "Big Four" conferences at the time to play in the national tournament for the first time (Union, who would become the last in 2011). The Nanooks fell 3-1 to Boston College in Worcester, in a game that was tied at one heading into the third period.

That experience definitely marked a high point for Fairbanks, but they've had their struggles ever since. The CCHA dissolved in 2013, requiring the team to move into the WCHA with UAA, a rival which frequently supplied them with the lion's share of their non-conference games through the Governor's Cup. The team hasn't been awful in his first two WCHA seasons - they managed a 4th-place finish this past season in a year where the league had two of the best teams in the nation - but last year was in many ways a low point for the team as well.

In November 2014, the NCAA handed down fairly severe sanctions to the school's athletic programs, including the hockey team, for fielding ineligible players between 2007 and 2012. The hockey team itself had allowed six different players to compete despite having been academically ineligible for various reasons. The NCAA wiped away all wins during the impacted period, leaving Ferguson, who had been close to becoming the school's all-time winning coach, with only a handful of wins from 2013 and 2014, and technically erasing the school's lone NCAA tournament appearance.

The Nanooks were also banned from post-season eligibility for 2015, leaving them unable to compete in the WCHA Tournament despite that fourth-place finish. They've also been docked a scholarship for the next two seasons to come.

By some metrics, one could say that coming into this season, the Nanooks are the hottest team in the country. That's kind of weak, since they'll be coming into their next game off a seven-month layover, but Alaska was unbeaten in their last eight games in a row to end the year. The only other team that didn't lose their last game was the national champions, Providence, and they only ended their year on a four-game winning streak.

The Nanooks had some pretty good balance to their attack last season. They return six different players who had at least five goals, including both of their top two scorers in Morley and Basara, who had 15 and 12 respectively. The team platooned goaltenders last year as Davis roughly split time in net with Sean Cahill, who graduated. That should leave things solely to Davis this season, though Alaska will surely be looking for an improvement on his .898 save percentage. If he doesn't, the team could be vulnerable defensively as they seek to replace three regular defensemen from last season, two who graduated and an All-American, Colton Parayko, who signed an NHL contract. Parayko would have been a senior this year, but instead the Nanooks will lose their lone NHL draftee.

That one loss certainly will hurt the team, but by and large, the other elements that made them function last season and finished the season strong will be back. They're certainly rebounding from the hit they took last year off the ice, and much like UAA, the Nanooks have a bit more room to operate in the new WCHA than they had before the big shakeup. We've seen before how winning, even against weaker teams, tends to beget winning, even being competitive against stronger teams. That could well be true just coming into the RPI game, as Alaska will be coming off a game in Anchorage against Arizona State and a game the previous night against American International. One would have to expect Fairbanks to be favored in both of those games, and they'll be the home team on Saturday night against the Engineers as well.

Once again, RPI will be presented with a team whose defense isn't going to be among the very stingiest in the nation, and a growing young corps of forwards - especially, perhaps, Viktor Liljegren and Jesper Ohrvall, who will get a bit of a homecoming as former Fairbanks Ice Dogs - will need to find ways to take advantage in order to be successful. With the larger ice and the home crowd, give the edge to Alaska, but if the Engineers play their game (and, as usual, get strong play between the pipes), there's no reason they couldn't knock the full list of Division I teams they've never beaten down to seven.

Look at that. Got all the way through and didn't even mention this.