WATERVILLE — After what boiled down to a rebuilding year last winter, the Colby College men’s ice hockey team believes it’s ready for a return to the top of the league this season.
“We’re very up front that we’re expecting to win a championship this year,” said Colby junior Spencer Hewson on Friday. “We have a very talented team. We’re going to talk about goals this weekend and set it as a team, but the seniors and guys talking together so far, we’re expecting to be a very good team.”
The Mules, who finished sixth in the New England Small College Athletic Conference in 2018-19, took the first steps toward making that goal a reality on Friday. NESCAC winter sports teams were allowed to begin practices at 12:01 a.m., which Colby did before hitting the ice again late in the afternoon.
The thing that looked most different was how much looked familiar.
After losing 10 players from its 2018 NCAA Division III Frozen Four team in 2018, Colby head coach Blaise MacDonald plugged freshman and inexperienced sophomores into more than half the nightly lineup a season ago. Still two weeks away from a season which begins on the road Nov. 15-16 at Williams and Middlebury, respectively, the projected lineup for opening night against the Ephs was almost entirely returning players.
“It’s a big difference,” Hewson said. “At the end (of practice Friday), we said, ‘That was like a midseason practice.’ Guys were clicking, guys were running the system.”
“Last year, quite frankly, was a fabulous season,” said MacDonald, the 2018 national coach of the year, now in his eighth season at the helm. “It wouldn’t have surprised me if we’d missed the playoffs, but we were right in the hunt for fourth, fifth, sixth place. … It was great growth and development for us.”
Colby finished 10-10-5 overall last season and lost in the NESCAC quarterfinals, where they were blanked 5-0 by Amherst.
With such a short preseason for NESCAC teams, the focus is a simple one as the Mules gear up for key league games right out of the gate — three of them in a row to open the campaign, including hosting rival Bowdoin on Nov. 23 to begin the final season at historic Alfond Rink.
Alfond will be replaced by Colby’s new athletic complex, which is set to open next fall.
“It sounds like a cliche, but it’s the fundamentals,” Hewson said. “It’s not like that first weekend we’re going to be out there running crazy power-play trick plays. It’s about making sure everyone knows the D-zone (system), everyone is skating in their lanes on the forecheck and just trying to execute what we get under our belts. Then we can take it from there.”
“The biggest key points for us are nailing down our systems,” said Colby center Robert Cerepak, one of seven seniors on the roster. “Then it’s just locking it down effort-wise and intensity-wise, bringing the intensity and physicality that’s a part of our game. It’s just bringing that up a level from the preseason.”
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