The University of Maine men’s hockey team is halfway through its Hockey East schedule with only four home games and eight road contests remaining.

The fourth-place Black Bears are within four points of leader New Hampshire and five points ahead of seventh-place Providence. Maine has played one less game than New Hampshire and Providence.

Everybody in Hockey East has played at least one more league game than the Bears.

“Last year, we found out how quickly you can move up fast in Hockey East. You can go from fifth to second in a weekend. That shows how tough our league is,” said junior center Marty Kariya, whose Bears have gone 10-3-2 over their last 15 overall games. “We’ve been a very inconsistent team. We’ve got only 12 games left and we don’t want to wind up in fourth or fifth place. We want to put a run together.”

In Maine’s 5-1 and 5-3 sweep of Merrimack last weekend, Whitehead changed personnel on his top two scoring lines to try to jumpstart them.

The second night’s lineup peppered 46 shots at the Warrior net and saw Michael Schutte, who had been the left wing on a line with Kariya and 20-goal scorer Colin Shields, centering a fourth line between freshmen John Ronan and Paul Falco.

Freshman Ben Murphy, who had centered the all-freshman line, was moved up to left wing on a scoring line with Tommy Reimann and Niko Dimitrakos, and junior Lucas Lawson moved from the Reimann line to the left wing on the line with Kariya and Shields.

Dimitrakos and Shields each scored twice and Kariya had the other goal.

“I think we’re moving in the right direction. Lines can stay together for just so long. Other teams start keying on them,” said Kariya. “I thought our line showed a lot of chemistry even though we hadn’t practiced together. We always made sure we had somebody high in the offensive zone.”

Interim head coach Tim Whitehead said, “We tweaked the lines to get more production out of the top two lines and I thought they played well. We also got good performances from our other two lines.”

Whitehead liked what he saw from Schutte at center. Schutte had been a wing all season.

“Michael was physical, won a majority of his faceoffs and kept it pretty simple,” said Whitehead. “He had a good game.”

Whitehead thought Dimitrakos had his best game of the season. The checking line of Hockey East Player of the Week Robert Liscak between Todd Jackson and Gray Shaneberger combined for four goals and five assists on Friday and kept Merrimack pinned in its own end in the final minute of play on Saturday as Maine protected a one-goal lead until Kariya scored.

The Maine coach benched first-year defenseman Prestin Ryan on Saturday after he took his third five-minute major of the season along with a two-minute minor in the first period of Friday’s game.

Ryan also sat out the second and third periods of Friday’s game.

“He’s going on the trip to [UMass-]Lowell this weekend and we’ll see whether he plays or not on the first night. We’ll see how he practices this week,” said Whitehead.

“We haven’t given up on him. I think he took only two penalties over the previous six games,” said Whitehead.

Ryan leads Maine’s defensemen in goals with four and mans the point on one of the power plays. He also leads the team with 57 penalty minutes.

UM soccer women honored

The University of Maine’s women’s soccer team received the National Soccer Coaches Association of America and Adidas Academic Achievement Award.

The award is presented to teams that have attained a collective grade point average of 3.0 or better.

And Black Bear sweeper Linda Consolante was named to the Northeast Region All-Freshman team by Soccer Buzz Magazine.

Consolante had two goals and helped anchor a stingy defense that allowed one goal per game in compiling the first winning season in the program’s brief history.

She was selected to the All- America East first team and the league’s all-rookie team.