Hockey, Basketball Have Blue Christmas As Crimson Vacation Campaigns Backfire

If it is the quest for experience that motivates the H.A.A. to schedule road trips for the hockey team with such opposition as McGill and Colorado, the recently concluded tour may be considered a success. The Varsity dropped five straight without a single win.

It's not that they were upsets--McGill's roster looks like that of a Bruins farm team, and Minnesota and Colorado are both strong contenders in any league.

As a matter of fact, the Varsity held up well, all circumstances considered. It took the vaunted Canadian squad 17 minutes and four seconds to sink their first marker, which was equalled almost immediately by the Crimson. But in the second and third periods the floodgates opened to let eight separate players tally eight more markers for the hosts, while the Crimson could only muster three, two of them by Dave Abbot. The final score was 9 to 4.

Four Western Games

Undaunted, the team re-assembled right after Christmas for the long trek out to Colorado and two games with the University thereof. These proved to be the worst defeats of the campaign, as the tired Crimson went down, 13 to 6 and 10 to 3, on successive nights. In the opener, the offense couldn't seem to get organized, despite two tallies each by Dave Key and Myles Huntington, and only the stalwart net defense of Bill Yetman kept the score from running into three figures. The next night Yetman was forced to take the ice with an injury, while the team again failed to find itself offensively.

On the way back home, the team stopped off for two final tussles with the University of Minnesota. Despite the outcome, both games had their moments of excitement and were creditable performances by the Crimson, who were by this time without the services of both Johnny Crocker and Yetman. In the opener, the Varsity overcame a four-goal deficit with a furious offensive blast in the final period, only to slip behind again in the closing minutes to go down to an 8 to 6 defeat.

In the last game of this disasterous foray to the west, the sextet pulled itself together and matched the Gophers goal or goal until they broke away in the final stanza to hang up four goals and make the final score 7 to 4.