This week’s notebook highlights some of the players who have excelled in the SHSHL playoffs but whose teams don’t have a championship trophy.
By Mike Prince, Sportswriter
With juniors Matthew Mette and Dalton Bideau, along with sophomore Ryan Nowicki stepping up in big defensive roles this season, North Penn coach Kevin Vaitis was given the ability to move Caleb Witzaney up to the forward position, where he would go on to be one of the most prolific goal scorers in the entire Suburban One League during the 2012-13 Suburban High School Hockey League season.
Along with star defenseman Jeremy Snyder, the presence of the three defenders made North Penn a better team on both sides of the ice. It made the Knights more dangerous while giving even more help to goaltenders Cody Matthews and Jake Wolff, who were already doing fine on their own.
The improvements helped North Penn to finish the regular season atop the Continental Conference, but it didn’t help the Knights in the playoffs like they had hoped.
For the second consecutive season, North Penn’s season was ended by Central Bucks South. Again, it was ended in two games, and again, it was ended by a very slim margin.
One year after losing two one-goal games to Titans, the Knights again lost a best-of-three series to CB South, 2-0, losing by one goal in Game 1 and two goals in Game 2. The series win gave the Titans the Continental Conference Class AA championship and a No. 1 seed entering the Flyers Cup.
“It was almost identical,” North Penn coach Kevin Vaitis said. “And now we’re the same seeds going into the Flyers Cup, and it was really just the same thing last year.
After losing 7-6 last Friday and 5-3 on Monday, the Knights still find themselves in the Flyers Cup with a high seed, but they would’ve liked to come out with a better result against the Titans.
“We basically had three guys step up their game on defense this year and it allowed us to move Caleb from defenseman to forward,” Vaitis said. “He got a lot of production and with Jeremy being our best defender, we had a lot of flexibility to get stuff done offensively. Matt, Dalton and Ryan all helped contribute to our success and helped out our goalies, who are two of the best in the league.
“All of that allowed us to do things offensively where we can test them and push them a little more than we have in the past.”
The Knights, who will face Conestoga at Hatfield Ice Arena Thursday at 9 p.m., will have to improve upon maintaining their discipline if they wants to have a chance at getting trough the Flyers Cup.
“We get caught up in some of the excitement that comes with a playoff or championship game, and we just have to go out there and focus on playing our own style of hockey,” Vaitis said. “If that happens, I like our chances of how things are set up for us. We’re not going to overlook Conestoga, but we have potential matchups with Souderton and Downingtown East.”
After being knocked out by Downingtown East last season, Vaitis says the ultimate goal for his team is to get to that semifinal round and avenge last year’s loss.
“That’s the team our guys really want to play,” the Knights’ coach said. “We just need to maintain our discipline and try to get to the game.”
The American Conference Class A championship series went a bit different than the North Penn/CB South series as Upper Moreland took Archbishop Wood to the wire in a battle of the defending league champion Bears and the Vikings, who are in their first year of play in Class A.
After Upper Moreland defeated Wood 5-2 last Friday, the series took a complete 180 as Wood came out with a 10-3 win on Monday and a 4-1 win on Tuesday to come away with the conference championship.
After getting the usual fantastic start by goalie Jared Burch, who stopped 35 shots in Game 1, Burch missed the first period of Game 2. The end result was a 4-1 Bears deficit after one period, which Upper Moreland coach Jim Stapler said changed the series.
After finishing the regular season with a record of 10-2-2, recording a goals-against average of 2.20 and a save percentage of .907, Burch continued to be known as one of the best if not the best goalie in the league.
And his absence was felt.
“We didn’t have our starting goalie, and it set us back a little bit,” Stampler said. “Our guys just played differently. It hurts because he is such an important part of this team and he’s such a leader, so it hurt for many reasons and not just that we played badly. It affected our mental preparation part of coming into the game and it was just hard for the guys.”
Though Upper Moreland returned much of its team from last year, the Bears knew entering the season that repeating as conference champions would be tough with Wood joining their class.
“We had a feeling that we would be playing in this series with Wood,” Stampler said. “We know they always have a good team and we definitely expected that playing them would be a possibility. Wood was in AA. They’re an AA team.”
Upper Moreland, which is an eight-seed entering the Flyers Cup, will begin play with a first round game against Garnet Valley at Warwick Ice Arena on Thursday at 8:30 p.m.
One team that nearly upset Wood in the first round of the SHSHL playoffs, Wissahickon, had its season end on Monday following a 4-2 loss to West Chester Rustin in the first round of the Flyers Cup.
For a time, the Trojans sat atop the American Conference, but eventually faded down the standings as the Bears and the Vikings climbed to the top. Despite the early exit, Wissahickon coach Ryan McLaughlin, who will lose four very talented seniors, was very happy with his team’s efforts this season and is very much looking forward to the future.
“I thought we ended the season on a good note,” McLaughlin said. “We played Wood and made it a game, and considering they 10-goaled us earlier this season, I was very proud of my guys and their effort. We have a lot of good players and we’re excited about the future, but we’re going to miss our seniors.”
Joey Honorowski, Jules Lever, Dave Pataki and Tyler Freas are among the four seniors graduating and moving on to college.
“Those guys have a done a lot for us,” McLaughlin said. “They’ve been in the program since middle school and all of them contributed. They played very well and I’m very excited for them to move on to college and continuing to play and do well wherever they go.”
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