Jefferson Hagen, MacEwan Athletics
CALGARY – Eventually, the goals were bound to go in.
Dramatically dominating the SAIT Trojans on the shot clock for a second-straight night (47-27 this time), the MacEwan Griffins found their finishing touch, scoring five times in a 5-2 win that completes a first weekend sweep and pushes their record to 2-0-0 on the young ACAC season.
"I think the biggest difference for us tonight is we found that offensive touch we were looking for last night and lacked," said MacEwan head coach Lindsay McAlpine, whose team outshot SAIT 44-19 on Friday but settled for a 1-0 win. "We were able to capitalize and we got five, but we hit a couple of crossbars, missed a couple open nets and the goalie made a couple of great saves. It could have been upwards of eight."
Kennedy Davidson opened the scoring for the Griffins at 12:49 of the first period, which got them off the schneid, so to speak.
"We actually had a shaky first 10 minutes," noted McAlpine. "I always equate it to getting off the bus and having bus legs, but that's something we need to get used to because road trips aren't going to stop. After those 10 minutes, we took back control of the game."
SAIT's Karmen Mooney knotted the score just 12 seconds in the second period before the Griffins got on their horse and put the hammer down.
Raven Beazer, Breanna Golosky and Shyla Jans pushed MacEwan's lead to 4-1 after 40 minutes and Chantal Ricker made it 5-1 before SAIT's Brittany MacDonald scored a late powerplay goal to cap the scoring.
"On the flip side of it – again, I always like to look for things we can build on and get better in our own game and I thought the two goals that we let in ... they're areas we didn't get burned on but could if the score was 1-0, so we need to get better at that."
Golosky was the revelation of the evening for McAlpine. Playing in just the 16th ACAC regular season game of her career, the third-year Fort McMurray native was a force – remarkable considering she was just informed in the morning she'd be in the lineup.
"She scored a beautiful goal, was great on both sides of the puck and didn't get to have the pre-game routine that everybody else did. I was really proud of her," said McAlpine.
"She had some great chances for a second or third goal," she added. "It speaks to the depth of our team that I can pull anybody out of the stands and they can have success."
Natalie Bender made 25 saves for MacEwan in the win.
The Griffins will next get set for a home-and-home series against Olds College (0-0-0), at Olds on Thursday (7 p.m.) and back at home next Saturday (6 p.m., Downtown Community Arena).
