Jefferson Hagen, MacEwan Athletics
CARONPORT, Sask. – The toughest road trip in the Alberta Colleges Athletic Conference tripped up the MacEwan Griffins on Friday night.
After destroying the Briercrest College Clippers 15-3 and 11-3 in Edmonton back in November, the Griffins were upset 3-2 in the opening game of their weekend series at Barkman Arena.
Classic trap game that interim head coach Sean Ringrose hopes his team learns a hard lesson from.
"It's a good lesson to learn," he said. "There's a couple of those for us tonight. One is to never take your opponent for granted. I think we were definitely guilty of that. We left too much up to chance tonight and we did run into a really good goaltender who showed his ability to make a ton of saves and backstop that team to a win.
"For us, we need to regroup and make sure tomorrow that we're ready to play collectively and that we show up with a far better effort."
Although the Griffins outshot the Clippers 42-29 in the contest and ran into former Ontario Hockey League goaltender Dan Dekoning, who made 40 saves and has shown the ability to steal games on a regular basis, Ringrose wasn't pleased with how his troops played.
"You have to give them credit," he said of the Clippers. "They came out extremely hard. Obviously, they were not happy about the results from the last time we played. Their goalie did play extremely well.
"That being said, we had way too many passengers tonight – a lot of guys not ready to play. We had guys not playing our game on their own page. Ultimately, if that's going to be what we get showing up to play a game, that's the result we're going to end up with."
The Griffins hadn't lost after Christmas break prior to Friday's contest and had climbed into a tie for second place in the conference with Red Deer College. Friday's setback drops them to 15-6-0-0 and takes them out of the driver's seat for a first-round playoff bye as idle RDC (14-4-2-0) has a game in hand.
The Clippers improve to 6-12-2-1, clawing within four points of idle Concordia (7-10-1-2) for the ACAC's final playoff spot.
After MacEwan's Joseph Karpyshyn opened the scoring midway through the first period on Friday, Briercrest's Josiah Friesen knotted it 1-1 after 20 minutes.
The Clippers went up 2-1 in the second period on Reagan Poncelet's powerplay marker 3:47 into the frame and took a commanding 3-1 lead when Josh Boelema scored 11:26 into the third.
Spencer McLean gave the Griffins hope when he scored with 2:36 remaining, but they were unsuccessful in netting the equalizer with goaltender Thomas Davis on the bench for the final 1:10 in favour of an extra attacker. Davis finished with 26 saves.
"It certainly was a disappointing game for us with the result," said Ringrose. "I would hope that our guys show up with a better effort tomorrow."
If history is any indication, expect the Griffins to do just that in Saturday's rematch (1 p.m. MT, ACAC TV). The last time MacEwan lost at Briercrest was a 2-1 setback during the 2017-18 season and they bounced back with a 6-3 win in the second game of the weekend.
