Bapst battles numbers game Undermanned Crusaders winning with hard work, conditioning

BANGOR – The vast majority of the time, icing carries a negative connotation in hockey.

But icing has been a relatively friendly term to the John Bapst High School hockey team.

When you have just seven or eight skaters and two goalies, being able to catch a breath whenever possible is important.

And an icing results in a stoppage in play and requires one of the referees to skate down to retrieve the puck and bring it back up the ice.

The Crusaders have been smart about conserving energy this season. They will enter Thursday’s 2:15 p.m. game against 4-0 Orono at Alfond Arena with a 3-1 record.

“We do get exhausted,” admitted senior left wing, tri-captain and leading scorer Zach Means. “But we’re pretty well-conditioned. Because we don’t have enough people at practice, we all have to skate pretty hard.”

With limited numbers, you don’t have players waiting in line to participate in a drill.

“We skate all the time in practice. We do 90 minutes of flow drills,” said 54-year-old coach Doug Damon, who is in his first season replacing the late Ray Thibodeau. “The guys are in good shape. They have a tremendous work ethic.”

He also credited Thibodeau for leaving him a group of players who are well-schooled fundamentally.

Senior defenseman and tri-captain Taylor Lynn said, “The hard work is paying off.”

The other tri-captain, center John Motta, said five players were on the Eastern Maine Class B championship soccer team so they were already in good shape coming into hockey season.

“I think we all came into the season in real good shape,” said Motta.

But he also acknowledged that “we get really tired. Sometimes, we only come off the ice twice a period. You’ve got to learn to play a little bit differently. You can’t go full out all the time. You’ve got to save your energy.”

Means added, “We try to slow the pace of the game. We’ll take an icing here and there. And we play more of a zone defense which conserves energy.”

The Crusaders do use the energy-preserving neutral zone trap and play the body judiciously.

Assistant coach Justin Tomberlin, the former University of Maine hockey and baseball player, said there are plusses and minuses to having a low number of players.

“You can’t do a lot of things in practice, like five-on-five and penalty-killing drills,” said Tomberlin. “But, during a game, it’s easy to manage the bench [line changes].”

Damon quipped, “There isn’t much confusion during the game.”

Means, who has 11 goals and five assists, plays on the one and only line with Motta (6 & 6) and junior right wing Colby Theriault (2 & 4).

Lynn (4 & 4) and sophomore Kyle Maynard (0 & 9) start on defense. Theriault will play some shifts on defense and Maynard will see forward duty.

Senior Billy Chapman ( 1 & 1) is playing hockey for the first time in his life and sees duty on the wing along with freshman Brandon Cossette (1 & 1).

“I knew they would be down in numbers. The only time I had skated was around ice fishing holes,” said Chapman, who had played basketball for three years. “It has been really fun. It’s a lot more fun than basketball right now.”

Junior winger Reuben Thibodeau has just joined the team and will debut Thursday.

Sophomore Dan Leighton (2-1) and freshman Jamie Hardy (1-0) have handled the goaltending. Josh Wiersma is the goaltending coach.

Bapst, which has had five players transfer to other area schools the past two seasons, will be bolstered by the return of four injured or ailing players over the next month.

Then they won’t have to ice the puck as much.