This weekend marks the return of several historic rivalries throughout the college hockey landscape.
In nearly every league, a major matchup dots the schedule with a rare confluence of games, and it feels as if fans got together and circled a collective date for the weekend series between Boston College and Boston University, Northern Michigan and Michigan Tech, Air Force and Army, or UMass and UMass Lowell. Even newer matchups like those offered in the Connecticut Ice tournament are on the docket, and anyone willing to stay up late can watch Alaska play Alaska Anchorage in the Governor’s Cup.
In ECAC, the Cornell-Harvard game on Saturday night is likely to take center stage from a conference docket that includes the North Country rivalry between Clarkson and St. Lawrence, but they might pale compared to the Mayor’s Cup matchup between Union and Rensselaer, a game so intense, it’s a non-league matchup offering a third game between the two teams situated in New York’s Capital District.
“There are obviously ups and downs to any season, but for us, there have been some real highs and lows,” said Union coach Josh Hauge. “You look at some of the games that maybe got away from us, and I probably could have done a better job managing those situations, but then there are some really nice wins. To be able to push back and get to .500 in out-of-conference play [coming into this weekend] was huge for us with the start we had, so overall it’s been a lot of fun with a lot of different challenges.”
This weekend is Hauge’s first trip into the Mayor’s Cup matchup, but he’s far from a stranger to the matchup between Union and RPI after the teams split their conference matchup in late October. That series shifted between the two programs with the home team winning each side, and Union rallied to post a 6-0 shutout one night after losing 2-1 in nearby Troy.
It was Union’s 44th overall win in the rivalry and came within a goal of tying the program’s largest margin of victory over RPI that was set during the first-ever matchup in 1924 (though the largest win overall still belongs to the Engineers), but it further laid a rubber match foundation for when Saturday’s third game shifts to MVP Arena in Downtown Albany.
The win was his first ECAC conference victory and preceded a win at Clarkson that rocketed Union into the front of the league’s early run, and though the Dutchmen largely avoided a major downturn of results for most of the first half, Saturday’s non-conference game gives them an opportunity to continue last week’s bounce back from a conference winless streak that stretched through much of January.
With a seven-game winless streak in ECAC games in hand, Union broke out by beating St. Lawrence, 3-2, to gain three points and pull within one game’s work of Brown’s two-point advantage for the last home slot in the first round of the postseason.
“Our biggest challenge has just been our consistency,” Hauge said. “For the most part, there have been three first-year defensemen that have played every single night, or we’ve had three first-year defensemen in the lineup every night. Mason Snell didn’t play last year as a transfer, so some guys that hadn’t seen a ton of minutes are now getting a ton [of time] for us.
“It’s hard to win in college hockey, and the level that you have to compete with on every night, our guys are always working hard. That’s never been an issue.”
The performances are within the realm of expectations for a program that finished last year on the rocky road that began with the saga surrounding then-head coach Rick Bennett. The well-documented drama resulted in his resignation following a midweek win over Dartmouth, and three days after he left the program, Union defeated RPI in the Mayor’s Cup with a 2-0 win at MVP Arena in Albany.
The team only won three of its nine final regular season matchups, though it was still enough to finish in seventh and host Princeton in the first round of the postseason. After a two-game split, Union pushed Clarkson, one of the conference’s strongest teams, to two bitterly-fought overtime games before the season ended with a sweep loss to the Golden Knights in the quarterfinals.
Hauge was an assistant coach for Clarkson during that run, but the meeting between the two clubs incidentally drew a bridge for Casey Jones’ longtime lieutenant to join Union as its next head coach. He was hired in April, less than a week after the Frozen Four concluded, and he spent the next months moving himself southeast to the Albany area while simultaneously reconstructing an emotionally-drained program.
“You want to blend the roster as much as you can [as a new coach],” he said. “We brought in a lot of players, but I never wanted it to feel like there were my players and the guys that were returning. Everyone is our player, and they were all part of our family, and we wanted this team to be a place that was a welcome place for anyone putting on the jersey. If they were putting on the Union jersey, they were valued, whether they were in the lineup or not and whether they were ‘my recruit’ or not.”
That level of stabilization was always going to include some bumps, but many of those feelings could easily vanish if the Dutchmen claim another Mayor’s Cup trophy win. The matchup itself won’t count towards the ECAC standings, but the big game feel of playing on neutral ice in Albany can’t be discounted in a series that lays claim to the oldest days of college hockey.
“I knew what the atmosphere was like at Union, and I knew how hard of a place it was to play,” Hauge said. “Other than that, I knew you could win here because they’d done it before, and with all of the excitement around the program, it was the perfect storm to throw everything into [coming here]. Luckily enough, I was given the opportunity with the potential [of the program]. Everything was kind of building, and I thought it was a great opportunity.”
The Mayor’s Cup game between Union and RPI is scheduled for Saturday night at 6 p.m. from the MVP Arena in Albany, N.Y.
