Loaded girls hockey team off to hot start

Senior Leah McClellan and the Bulldog D have allowed 5 goals through 5 games this season. (Mike Barucci photo)

Update: The CHS girls hockey team held on to beat Medfield/Norton 3-2 in overtime in the opening round of the Canton Ice House Invitational on Thursday. The unbeaten lady Bulldogs will now battle Westwood for the tournament title on Saturday at 3:30 p.m.

With two more convincing wins last week, the CHS varsity girls hockey team remains unbeaten on the season and already looks to be in midseason form as the calendar gets set to flip to 2019.

Coming off back to back trips to the Division 2 state finals, the lady Bulldogs are again one of the early title favorites as they return several key starters from last year’s team, led by all-star forward and senior captain Maggie Malloy. The big question mark going into this season was how they would fare without the services of all-star netminder Colleen Kelleher, but so far they have not skipped a beat with new goalie Ava Pacitti, who has been outstanding through the first four games with a goals against average of 0.75.

“This team, even though we’re pretty young, the hockey IQ is pretty high and we’re doing more things well early on,” said head coach Dennis Aldrich. “I think we’ve skated better than most of the teams we’ve seen so far, but right now our focus is on playing well, and when you do that the winning tends to take care of itself.”

While the team has yet to really be tested through the first two weeks of the season, Aldrich was quick to point out that the schedule gets much tougher going forward, starting with a tough matchup on Thursday against Medfield in the opening round of the Canton Ice House Invitational.

Begun by Aldrich in 2016, the four-team holiday tournament has special meaning for the lady Bulldogs as it honors the memory of the late Pat Walsh, a Canton native and former Canton Youth Hockey coach who passed away in 2016 at age 48.

The Westwood Wolverines (3-0), who also call the Ice House home, will take on Milton in the other first round matchup, with the two winners advancing to play in the tournament finals on Saturday at noon. The Bulldogs are the defending champions after knocking off Milton in last season’s tournament finals, but Westwood claimed the inaugural Walsh Cup a year earlier and enters the game ranked one spot ahead of Canton in the HNIB D2 Girls Poll at No. 2 overall (Wellesley, last year’s state title winner, is currently No. 1).

Even if the two squads do not meet up in Saturday’s tournament final, they will square off on January 12 with D1 powerhouse Duxbury just around the corner. “What I’m preaching to our girls is the importance of getting better every day because we have these teams coming up in our schedule,” said Aldrich. “So we really need to take advantage of this time to really clean up our mistakes in order to have a chance to compete against some of the best.”

Yet even Aldrich himself acknowledged that there hasn’t been much to nitpick after a 4-0 start in which the team has outscored the opposition 20-3.

In their most recent win, Aldrich rolled out four lines and gave a lot of players valuable ice time as the Bulldogs cruised to an 8-0 victory over Whitman-Hanson at the Rockland Ice Arena. The top forward line of Malloy, sophomore Ellie Rae Roberts and freshman Tess Khoury accounted for six of the eight goals in another dominant showing while seniors Lauren Fitzpatrick and Theresa O’Brien chipped in with a goal apiece. Defensemen Meg Aldrich and Katie Trerice each had two assists and finished plus-3 during their time on the ice as Canton dominated the action from start to finish.

Meanwhile, it was a similar story last Wednesday in Foxboro as the Bulldogs rolled past King Philip 4-1 to notch their first Hockomock League win of the season. Malloy had all four goals for the visitors with linemates Roberts and Khoury assisting on three of them. The defense also looked great behind the pairings of Aldrich/Alexa Maffeo and Trerice/Leah McClellan, with Pacitti stopping 22 of the 23 shots she faced.

Looking at the bigger picture, Aldrich said the team still has areas it needs to improve upon if it is going to compete with and win against the state’s top teams. He said it’s too soon to say whether they belong in that category themselves, although he firmly believes that they can get there. “The rankings are nice and everything is great when you win, but it’s how we respond when things don’t go our way that will really determine the type of team we have and how far we can go,” said Aldrich.

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