Ice hockey at Emerson gets serious
“Rise like Lions after slumber, in unvanquishable number,” Percy Shelley once wrote in The Mask of Anarchy, a poem addressed to his fellow Englishmen after a massacre which took place at Manchester in 1819. Outgoing Emerson hockey captain Matt Porter might as well have delivered the same invocation to his rag tag squad at the end of their 2007-08 season.
The Lions were certainly asleep for the majority of last season, posting an abysmal overall 3-12-0 (1-8-0 NECHL) record, with two of their wins coming against the Rhode Island School of Design (GO NADS!). There were nights the team simply didn’t have the unvanquishable numbers they needed to win, as players were in and out of the lineup, tied up with school projects rather than thugs from Berklee College of Music or Tufts University.
“We weren’t really able to establish flow and coherence and identity,” Porter admitted. “To be frank, I’m sort of left with a bad taste, because we didn’t really win a lot.”
But 2008 looks to be an exciting year of transition for the Lions. Leadership duties have been handed down to Alan Gwizdowski ‘09 and Pete Keeling ‘10, who are looking for more team commitment. Porter has faith the duo will keep the Lions rising — both in level of skill and in the attention of the Emerson athletics department.
“Once you establish yourself as an actual club, I think, there’s not as much wild growth,” Porter said. “But the key is to keep moving forward and reaching new goals. And I’m confident Pete and Gwiz will do that.”
Captain Gwizdowski (who served as assistant captain the past two seasons) says he plans to make the team stronger by getting them comfortable with each other and building chemistry.
“People get used to playing with certain other players on their lines,” said Gwizdowski, who is known as “Gwiz” to friends and teammates. “When people can’t make it to a game because of a film shoot, final project, etc. lines start getting switched and players skate at positions and with players they are not necessarily used to.”
Newly minted as assistant captain, Keeling spent his summer taking care of organizational duties, scheduling practices and games and ordering jerseys. Managing a team is nothing new for Keeling, who built a team, the Mendham Ice Bats, in his home state of New Jersey. With that experience, he gained experience in fundraising, team conditioning, logistics, and on-ice direction.
“Pete came to me as a enthusiastic young player whose enthusiasm sometimes got the better of him,” Porter said of Keeling. “He’s grown into the leadership role a bit, but I feel he has a little way to go.”
As Keeling goes, so does the team. He says the 2008 Lions are joining the ACHA — a move the Berklee Ice Cats made last year — which he believes will put the Lions on a legitimate level of competition and standards.
Keeling has been pushing for a condensed alternative to the sprawling season that dragged the last year’s squad from September through March, and an ACHA schedule will provide that. The team will play a total of 14 league games; 7 at home (Simoni Rink, Cambridge) and 7 on the road between September and December. They will also participate in an exhibition game against a team to be announced, and square off against Berklee for the 3rd annual Boylston Cup, which the Lions have came close to winning but lost in the previous two bouts.
The condensed schedule effectively makes ice hockey at Emerson a Fall-only endeavor, much to the relief of TV/Film students like Gwizdowski and Keeling, who plan to finish their Emerson studies at the school’s Los Angeles campus. Had a condensed schedule been in place last season, the team would not have lost players like hard-hitting Jeff Duray or star goalie Greg Cohen, who left in the Spring semester to take classes in Kasteel Well, Netherlands.
Keeling hopes the team coalesces around his enthusiasm for being on the ice, because they’ll be skating at least four times a week this Fall.
“More ice time helps us to progress as players and as a team,” Keeling said. “We used to be on the ice once maybe twice a week, and we’d get rusty in our off time. This allows us to really hone in on our skills and tune our games to the fullest potential.”
To get the team ready for the heavy workload, Keeling has organized a pre-season weekend retreat of work outs and team-building activities, which is taking place next weekend on the Jersey Shore.
The Lions are gathering, and they’re hungry.
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They’ll hit the ice for the first time September 18th and will have home games on Tuesday and Sunday nights. The full schedule will be released at training camp next week, which I’m going to try to attend and report on, so if I go, I’ll post that here once I get back.
