UND Say It’s Time To Get Down To Business

We are one month into the 2015-year, and the University of North Dakota women’s hockey team is taking big strides. Only losing one game this second half of the season, we have 5 wins under our belt and we are moving forward with that momentum. Our most recent sweep was against the Bemidji State Beavers. Although the Beavers started the scoring on Saturday afternoon, we battled back and won 4-1 with Amy Menke putting up some huge points for our team. Keeping our energy and work ethic consistent, we continued to battle and won 5-1 on Sunday afternoon for the completion of the sweep. It was the first time in awhile that we had swept in front of our home crowd, so the fans appreciated the showing we gave them this past weekend.

Coming up we travel to Minnesota-Duluth, a tough series but one we are certainly excited for. Earlier this season when we hosted the Bulldogs at Ralph Engelstad Arena it was a tough fought series that resulted in a split. We won the first game in a thrilling overtime and the Bulldogs salvaged a split with a 1-0 win.  This weekend will be a tough fought encounter with a lot of fast pace hockey and battling against one another. Getting ourselves back to the top 4 in the WCHA was a huge key for us last weekend, and we will need to continue this energy and determination throughout the remainder of the season to reach the goals we’ve set for ourselves.

With second semester classes starting up everyone on the team is getting back into routine of classes, workouts, and practice. For some of us, such as sophomores and freshman, it’s just another semester of getting good grades and training hard. But for the other half of our team, juniors and seniors, it’s an emotional time of preparing for the their senior year or the ending of their senior year. Our four seniors; Andrea Dalen, Josefine Jakobsen, Johannah Fallman, and Tori Williams are a huge part of our team and play key roles on and off the ice. So as the year starts to wind down to playoffs and our last full month of regular season play, we are ready to go all in for our seniors and for ourselves. There is no better feeling than hard work paying off and that is what we plan to do. Our next step is executing our full effort in practice to prepare for our weekend against the Bulldogs and that’s all we can focus on right now. We are excited to continue towards our goals to see how far our hard work and determination can take us!

-Alexis Shaw