Sextet Clobbers St. Nick's, 13-2, In First Hockey Game of Season

Harvard's hockey team glided to an easy 13-2 victory over St. Nick's Saturday night in an encouraging warm-up for its two games against Northeastern and Dartmouth this week.

With their high-scoring sophomore line of Joe Cavanagh, Dan DeMichele, and Steve Owen amassing five goals and seven assists, the skaters smashed a team with previous wins over Army and Yale.

The lopsidedness of the victory was partly due to St. Nick's lack of reserves (they only skated 12 men) and loss of several top players. Poorly-conditioned, the talented St. Nick's players laid back in their own zone and never challenged the Harvard defense.

DeMichele opened the scoring in the first period on assists from both Cavanagh and Owen, and then Bill Lamarche '64 scored to tie it up for St. Nick's. This was the end of the threat as Tom Micheletti scored a goal two minutes later which started a streak of six Harvard scores.

Harvard led 7-1 in the third period when St. Nick's Pete Bostwick added the second and final goal for the visitors. The Crimson then ran off another streak of six goals to end the game strongly.

Linemates Ron Mark and George Murphy had top-flight performances with five and four points respectively. George McManama, playing defense for the first time ever, contributed four assists.

Harvard's defense is the only question mark at this point. Coach Cooney Weiland only has junior Chris Gurry returning from last year's corps. With the loss of Terry Flaman, McManama moved back to the blue line with Gurry, and Skip Freman joined sophomore Dave Jones on the second unit.

Kent Parrot '68, one of Harvard's all-time leading scorers, played against his old teammates, but he spent more time in the penalty box with his four penalties than he did threatening Crimson goalies Bill Diercks and Bruce Durno.

The JV hockey team opens its season today at 4 p.m. against the Colby freshmen in Watson Rink.