FREDONIA, N.Y. – Two days after playing their final game last season, the Fredonia Blue Devil men’s hockey team held a team meeting to plot a new course.
The players covered various topics, including how to prepare for the 2015-16 season – which begins Friday night at Buffalo State. They talked about off-season conditioning. Most importantly, they talked about wanting change the culture of a program that has fallen on hard times.
“I threw out the topics, but they led the discussions,” head coach Jeff Meredith said during a Wednesday taping of Blue Devil Radio, hosted by Fredonia Radio System’s Chris Hoyt. “They came up with a policy, if you will, a roadmap of how to proceed from here. I give them credit because that’s the way it’s gotta be. I think we have good leadership.”
Senior defenseman Ryan Wilkinson (Calgary, Alberta) was elected team captain. His assistants are senior defenseman Mitch Kaufmann (Red Deer, Alberta), senior forward Taylor Bourne (Calgary, Alberta), and junior forward Hunter Long (Lebanon, Tenn.).
“They are filling a void,” said Meredith, whose beginning his 28th season behind the Blue Devil bench. “We did not have a lot of that last year. They are very organized, they are very detail oriented. They’ve had enough of losing. They’ve had enough of going at it half way. And now they’ve jumped all in and they expect their teammates to be all in.”
In addition to Friday’s road game against the SUNYAC-rival Bengals, the Blue Devils will entertain Southern New Hampshire at 7 p.m. Saturday in the Steele Hall Ice Arena. It’s the first of 15 home games this season. The doors open at 6 p.m.
“I think we’ve got a group of guys who have been caged up and they are dying to get loose,” Meredith said. “I expect our intensity will go through the roof. We’re doing some things hockey-wise that are making us a more aggressive than we have in the past. I think a lot of that is because we have better hockey players.”
This year’s roster includes 16 freshmen, many of whom will be making their collegiate debuts this weekend. “I think our freshmen class is unbelievably good,” Meredith said. “We’re a lot bigger than we have been. And we’re faster. We didn’t get big and slow, we got big and fast.”
Meredith is hoping the Blue Devils – picked for ninth in the nine-team SUNYAC coaches’ pre-season poll – can carry the day late in games.
“Everybody can skate,” he said, “with everybody in the league for 40 or 50 minutes, but we want to work so hard – roll four lines and three sets of D – that now conditioning becomes a factor the last 10 minutes of the game. The method behind the madness is that we want to go, go, go … we want to battle and compete.”
Friday’s opener is the latest installment in the all-sports Battle of Lake Erie series with Buffalo State. The Bengals are currently leading, 4-2. Fredonia won last year’s inaugural cup, 18-14.
