With two wins this weekend, the No. 3 Boston University women’s hockey team added to an already impressive stretch of home wins in regulation that dates back to Jan. 15.
The Terriers (7–1, 3–0 Hockey East) kicked off their weekend with a win over conference opponent University of Maine on Friday before they blanked Robert Morris University Saturday afternoon, giving them their 10th straight win in regulation at Walter Brown Arena.
In the game against the Black Bears (1–5, 1–3 Hockey East), BU found its way onto the board 11:53 into the first when junior transfer Shannon Doyle scored her first goal in a BU sweater. This goal gave the Terriers a 1–0 advantage and a lead that they would never give up during the course of the game.
Sophomore forward Kayla Tutino added to BU’s lead with the first of her two goals eight minutes into the second frame. While on the power play, junior co-captain Marie-Philip Poulin passed the puck to senior defenseman Kathryn Miller near the bottom of the left circle. Miller sent it toward the top of the crease where Tutino redirected it by Maine netminder Brittany Ott.
Toward the end of the second frame, Maine cut BU’s lead in half as senior Chloe Tinkler scored her first goal of the year.
Nonetheless, the Terriers created a cushion with two more goals in the third period — one a power-play goal by senior forward Jenelle Kohanchuk, and the other a goal by Tutino, her fifth of the season.
“[Tutino] loves to shoot the puck and she’s always tough to deal with because she’ll go get the grubby goals at the net,” said BU coach Brian Durocher. “I’m happy because she’s a kid who demands a lot of herself and everything she does. Sometimes it can be her greatest strength and it can be an enemy. But when you get some pucks to go in the net, maybe you relax a little and you make a better shot there.”
Maine scored once more with less than six minutes left in the game to account for the final score of 4–2. With the win, senior goaltender Alissa Fromkin earned her first victory in over a year after missing most of last season recovering from injury.
The next day, BU also found success as it held its opponent, Robert Morris (1–2–1), without score for its first shutout of the season.
Tutino continued her strong weekend of play by scoring what would become the game-winning goal just 2:28 into the first period.
Kohanchuk picked up the assist on Tutino’s goal, giving Kohanchuk the 100th point of her BU career.
“[She’s] a tremendous shot in the arm for our team,” Durocher said of Kohanchuk. “[She’s] one of the top players on our team, one of the real top forwards anywhere in the game of college hockey … She’s a veteran, she’s somebody who’s been around and played a lot of hockey and she’s somebody who can really support a line in a huge way.”
BU added onto that 1–0 lead with 3:23 left in the first period when freshman forward Sarah Lefort teamed up with linemates senior Jill Cardella and Poulin to overcome a strong Colonials’ defense. After picking up a pass by Cardella, Lefort carried the puck down the ice with a one-on-one before she passed it over to Poulin.
Poulin then fed the puck back to Lefort, who picked up her own rebound to score.
“She does two things: she goes to the net and she can shoot the puck,” Durocher said of Lefort. “When you do those two things with a big frame, that’s hard to match up against.”
After a scoreless second period, Lefort notched her second tally of the game, once again on assists from her linemates when she picked up a pass from Cardella and sent it by Colonial goaltender Kristen DiCiocco, giving BU a final score of 3–0.
“It was a team effort,” Lefort said. “[Poulin and Cardella] were moving the puck well tonight. We really just kept it simple and kept the passes going so we’re just crashing the net hard, so those goals are an effort from the line.”
Junior goaltender Kerrin Sperry took the win, her first shutout of the season, as she stopped 24 shots.
The Terriers will go back to their conference schedule on Wednesday and Saturday when they take on Boston College.
“[This weekend] is obviously a good starting point to get the ball rolling against BC,” Sperry said. “Playing against BC is always a different game, there’s always a bit of an emotional element to it.”
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
