Eagles Established As Top Team in the State of Florida
Big Wins Over Central Florida & Florida Atlantic Earn Eagles the Distinction of Being the Best in Florida!
November 5, 2006
After an exciting home opening weekend series with Life University, the FGCU Hockey Team were slated to take on the University of Central Florida (UCF) Golden Knights and Florida Atlantic University (FAU) Owls on consecutive weekends at Germain Arena. These two programs are arguably the best that Florida has to offer in college hockey besides FGCU. On Friday, October 27, 2006, the UCF Golden Knights rolled into Germain Arena from Orlando, Florida and were greeted by several hundred FGCU Eagles fans. Germain Arena has quickly become the home of one of the best college hockey crowds in the country thanks to support of the FGCU students over the past few years. The fans have made it very difficult for teams to play FGCU at home and has resulted in a home record of 21-1-0 in the past two years. As the puck dropped to open the series between the Ice Eagles and Golden Knights, the fans roared and it did not take long for FGCU to feed off the energy of their home crowd. The Eagles scored the first three goals of the game to jump out to an early lead, which they would keep for a majority of the game. As the Eagles tried to close out the first period, a couple defensive zone breakdowns and neutral zone turnovers resulted in some offensive pressure from the Golden Knights. UCF would bury a big goal before the first intermission resulting in a score of 3-1 after the first. UCF would pick up right where they left off in the first period and open the second period with two strong goals to even up the contest at 3-3. The sudden outburst from the Golden Knights woke the Eagles up and they were able to finish the period strong with two goals of their own to take back the lead 5-3 heading into the third. A solid defensive effort in the final frame secured the victory for FGCU as the game ended with a final score of 6-3 in favour of the Eagles. Coach Jensen stressed that " team defense needs to improve in order for us to continue to compete with the best teams in the country." He went on to say that "the team can not allow three goals against when playing better teams."
On Saturday night, the Eagles played a much better team game and were able to dominate the Golden Knights for all three periods. The final score of 10-3 was enough to satisfy the masses, but after allowing six goals in two games at home, the coaching staff commented that "improvements must be made on team defense." On Friday night, both Allan Penney and Justin Moore led the Eagles with 3 points each and on Saturday night, Captain Zach Messer tallied four points. |
