Head hockey coach Rick Comley speaks to the team before beginning practice. This will be Comley’s sixth season with the Spartans.
MSU hockey head coach Rick Comley doesn’t want his team to put last year’s national championship behind them. Comley, who will begin his sixth year behind the MSU bench Saturday night, said he believes you don’t put it in the past, you just deal with it. “Why in the world would something so difficult to win be dismissed so quickly?” he said.
Add to that the fact that Comley said he doesn’t see an arrogance in his team, either, after winning the title.
“They really had to work and scrape to earn that thing last year,” he said. “The way it happened made them all feel good.”
But if you look at the calendar, April 7 — the day MSU beat Boston College 3-1 in St. Louis to win the national title — is long gone. Now ahead lies Oct. 13, the day the Spartans open the 2007-08 season against No. 1 North Dakota — a season in which the Spartans find themselves ranked No. 3 in the nation in the USCHO.com/CSTV Division I Poll.
“It’s our team’s goal to repeat, but it’s every team’s goal to win the NCAA title,” junior forward Tim Kennedy said. “Right now, it’s October and you can’t win a title until April. If our team has a chance to repeat in March and April, then that’s when we’ll talk about it, but not right now. We’re not even close to repeating right now. We’re just trying to set up the year, strong team, strong start and build to our goal, which is winning again.”
To repeat, MSU will have to break a streak that has seen the last two national champions, Denver and Wisconsin, not even make the NCAA Tournament in the year following their titles.
Despite that fact, Comley is optimistic and said the days of dominance in college hockey are gone.
“There’s always a team ranked one, a team ranked two, but there’s probably 12 or 14 teams that ultimately could win the national championship,” he said. “So, that being the case, if you won it one year, you can win it again.”
But the key phrase that’s being floated around this preseason is “peaking at the right time,” which is something MSU pulled off to perfection last season.
“Last year, a lot of people counted us out,” senior defenseman Daniel Vukovic said. “The chemistry came together, and it came together at the right time. Timing is a huge part of hockey. It’s not always the most talented team through the whole stretch that wins it, but it’s the team that can progress into the most talented team at the end (that) will win it.”
So, with 10 of the team’s first 13 games of the season at home, the Spartans have a good opportunity not only to get some wins under their belt, but to get off to a good start in the CCHA, where winning the regular season championship remains one of the team’s top goals.
“We want to be competitive in the league right away,” junior forward Justin Abdelkader said.
“We’re going to have a big target on our backs, so it’s going to be even more important for us to play at the top of our game every night.”
Avoiding the past
Two trademarks of MSU hockey in the past few years have been losing to teams it shouldn’t and going on an early season swoon.
The Spartans have gone 17-19-6 in October and November the last three seasons, a number the team is determined to improve upon this season.
“We’ve given away so many games in the first half of the year my first couple years here,” junior goaltender Jeff Lerg said. “You just look back at it and wonder, ‘How did we lose this game?’ or ‘How did we play so bad for that period of time?’ or things like that. So we want to set a mindset for the team that that November slump that always happens, we don’t want that to happen again.”
On top of that, the team could’ve found itself on the outside of the NCAA Tournament after losing once each to Ferris State and Bowling Green and twice to Western Michigan in February last season.
“I’m still trying to answer why we faltered,” Comley said.
“That’s a sign of lack of maturity to me, if you look past teams and you don’t play a season right to the end, but maybe that’s why we won a national championship, too. That was such a wake-up call for everybody that they were as focused as any team I’ve ever seen.”
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Fresh faces
Comley boasts that his freshmen aren’t the most heralded coming in, but that when all is said and done, they rank as one of the top classes in the country.
This year is a little different.
MSU’s freshman class features defenseman Jeff Petry, the USA Hockey Junior Player of the Year, and forward Corey Tropp, who was selected by Buffalo in the 2007 NHL Entry Draft. Petry is expected to be on MSU’s top defensive pairing with Vukovic, while Tropp is slated to play on the second line with seniors Chris Mueller and Bryan Lerg.
On top of that, forward Dustin Gazley made his presence felt in the intrasquad scrimmage and the exhibition game.
“It’s a good freshman class, number one, top to bottom. Certainly, the guys who have received attention are Petry and Tropp and then Dustin Gazley would probably be the third,” Comley said. “I don’t think they have to be our best players, which is nice, but I think they’re going to make us better.”
In MSU’s exhibition win over Windsor on Tuesday, the freshmen combined for four points, with Tropp and Gazley combining for three goals and forward Joey Shean picking up an assist on Gazley’s goal. Petry played on both the power play and the penalty kill units.
Petry knows that he has a long season and a lot of hard work ahead of him.
“I want to play a regular shift,” he said. “Power play, penalty kill, if that comes in, that’s great. But as a freshman, coming in, there’s guys who won the national championship last year, so I’m going to have to work hard to beat them out.”
