It was an exhausting weekend for women’s hockey head coach Joakim Flygh. On Thursday, his first child, Josefin Francisco Flygh was born. The next night, he was at Ingalls Rink as the Bulldogs took on Harvard, the team he used to coach until coming to Yale two years ago.
But Flygh’s excitement did not carry over to his team on the ice. The women’s hockey team (1-22-0, 1-15-0 ECAC) followed its usual pattern of losses this weekend — now at a count of 16 in a row — with devastating home defeats of 8-0 to Harvard (14-6-1, 11-4-1 ECAC) on Friday and 6-0 to Dartmouth (14-6-2, 10-4-2 ECAC) on Saturday.
Forward Paige Decker ’14 said that the two losses were disappointing, but both Harvard and Dartmouth are very strong teams and are ranked nationally at No. 9 and No. 12, respectively.
Harvard is ranked second in the ECAC, and Dartmouth is tied for third. Yale is in 12th place in the 12-team conference.
“We just did not show up at the Harvard game,” forward Stephanie Mock ’15 said of Friday’s match. “They are a quick team, and we got caught standing still too often. They capitalized on their speed and took lots of shots.”
That speed and those shots combined early in the game for the Crimson and made for a mixture lethal to the Bulldogs. They were eventually outshot 46-9. Harvard scored at just 3:40 and 4:26 in the first period, and then again at 14:12.
Two more Harvard goals in the second period and three in the third led to the Crimson’s shutout victory over its Ivy rival.
Freshman goalie Jaimie Leonoff ’15 played for the first part of the game, making 20 saves and allowing five goals. Halfway through the second period, senior goalie Genny Ladiges ’12 took to the net and played the rest of the game, stopping 18 shots and letting in three.
Ladiges agreed with Mock, adding that the Bulldogs “came out flat,” “couldn’t find a rhythm” and were “outworked all over the ice.”
However, the team seemed to turn that paucity of power around in Saturday’s game against Dartmouth. All three players interviewed agreed that Yale played much better in the second game of the weekend, even though the score was not indicative of the team’s effort.
Mock said she thought that game, despite the score 6-0, was one of the team’s best of the year.
“We had so many scoring opportunities, I don’t know how we didn’t get a few in,” she said. “We were aggressive on our forecheck and caused them the cough up a few pucks. We could have played tighter in our defensive zone, but other than that I think the play of the game was much closer then the score reflects.”
Decker said that the given the matched efforts of the teams, the lopsided score rested on the Big Green’s solid goaltending by Lindsay Holdcroft, who was named one of the three stars of the game.
Yale was outshot by a smaller margin than on Friday — 52-28 — and managed to take the first shot of the game, only 20 seconds in. But Dartmouth made good on its first shot, scoring at 1:43 in the first period.
The Bulldogs kept the score at 1-0 for the rest of the first period. But the team, despite its efwforts, could not do the same for the latter two. The Big Green scored twice in the second and three times in the third for its 6-0 shutout victory.
Ladiges, who saved 46 of Dartmouth’s 52 shots, said that she felt she let in too many goals that tempered the team’s momentum going into the third period.
“It definitely was not the outcome we wanted, but we were happy with our efforts and hope to build off that,” Decker said, adding that if the team continues to compete at the same level as it did against Dartmouth, the team will win a game before the end of the season.
However, that season is effectively over for the team. There are only six games left, and Yale is 10 points out of the eighth and final playoff spot — so the Bulldogs would have to win every remaining game, and Brown and RPI, tied for eighth, would both have to lose the rest of their games this season.
Yale will play at St. Lawrence and Clarkson next weekend.