Women's Ice Hockey Skates into Playoff Hockey with Colgate Matchup

The start of the postseason marks a set of new beginnings in college hockey. More precisely, for the Harvard women’s ice hockey team, this weekend represents a fork in the road.

On one side: Win and keep alive hopes of repeating last year’s run to the national championship game.

On the other side: Lose and return to Cambridge empty-handed.

This “second season” has become familiar territory for the Crimson (16-10-3, 12-7-3 ECAC), as the team has reached the ECAC semifinal in every year since the turn of the millennium. The 2015-2016 rendition of the ECAC conference tournament finds the Crimson travelling to Colgate’s campus in Hamilton, N.Y. to take on the No. 9/9 Raiders for the second weekend in a row.

As a result of splitting last weekend’s decisions at Cornell and Colgate, Harvard lost control of home-ice advantage in the ECAC playoffs. Now the team will be forced to travel once again in order to keep its national championship hopes alive.

“It’s obviously not ideal, but I think we play well on the road,” freshman defender Kate Hallett said. “We want to go into the rink against Colgate and take over. Obviously having that home ice advantage would have been great, but we don’t. We need to go onto the next thing. We’ll take what we’ve got and move on to the next situation.”

The Crimson comes into the game ranked fifth on the ECAC ladder, one notch below the Raiders. This coming Friday will be the third time that the teams have met up this year, with Harvard coming away victorious in both of the previous matchups. The crossover of conference play throughout the regular season has allowed the two teams to get familiar with each other’s styles of play.

Last Friday, in the most recent matchup between the two, the Crimson was able to skate past Colgate to a 3-2 victory on a goal late in the third period from freshman Grace Zarzecki. But the teams were neck-in-neck for essentially all of the contest. Zarzecki’s shot, which was Harvard’s 28th of the night, was the difference between a tie in shots taken, as the Raiders tallied 27 on the night.

Hoping that the third matchup will yield the same result as the first two, the Crimson is using previous skating experience against its opponent in order to build upon its strategy.

“It gives us a sense of comfort that we were on that ice, that we played extremely well on that ice, and that we won on that ice,” freshman forward Chelsea Zaidie said. “Being familiar with the facility and things like that are helpful, but it will be a new game and a new opportunity to play our best.”

More important than the level of comfort is the need for execution on the ice. In the month of February, Harvard has gone 3-for-22 in power play opportunities, squandering many opportunities to score with a man-up advantage. Its overall power play percentage of 16.4 ranks the team in the middle of the pack in the ECAC and 22nd in the nation.

“We have a lot of power play opportunities, and something we really need to focus on is taking advantage of those opportunities by scoring,” ZIadie said.

On the defensive side of the puck, senior goaltender Emerance Maschmeyer comes into the game third in the ECAC in save percentage and fifth in total saves. In contrast to the team’s offensive struggles concerning the power play, the Crimson has the sixth-best penalty kill in the nation at an 89.7 percentage.

Overall team defense has been a high point in the season, as Harvard is ranked seventh in the nation with 1.76 goals allowed per game. Meanwhile Colgate sits in the 15th spot, allowing an average of 2.18 goals.

Stacking up against conference competition, junior forward Sydney Daniels and senior Miye D’Oench stand atop the offensive leaderboards. D’Oench’s 35 points on the season and Daniels’ 18 goals land them both in the top five among ECAC rivals.

Yet all the stats can be thrown out the window now that the team is facing a win or go home situation in the postseason.

“It’s late in the season, so we know the system. We know what we’re supposed to do,” Hallett said. “The key to it is is execution. The main thing in practice this weekend and the games this weekend is just going to be giving 100 percent, 100 percent of the time, and really focusing in on what we have to do in order to get the job done.”

—Staff writer Ariel Smolik-Valles can be reached at ariel.smolik-valles@thecrimson.com.