Men’s ice hockey (9-5-3) lost last night to Rowan by the score of 5-2, sweeping the Owls 2-0 in this season’s series in the process.
Despite the score, coach Ryan Frain was pleased with his team’s performance.
“I was actually really happy with the effort that the guys put out last night,” Frain said. “I definitely think the score wasn’t indicative of how we played. We played well for pretty much the entire 60 minutes.”
Rowan got on the board early, putting a rebound past senior goaltender Chris Mullen and into the net just one minute and 44 seconds into the game.
Though Frain said that the play was even on the ice, the opening period was dominated on the score sheet by Rowan. After scoring the early first goal, Rowan capitalized off a shot from the slot that Mullen couldn’t see with 10:20 left in the first, and capitalized again scoring off of a faceoff to give them a 3-0 lead with 7:50 left.
The Owl were able to spark some life before the end of the first period though, when senior forward Nick McMahon scored with just 2:20 left in the opening period to make it a two goal game heading into the second.
The second period started off with another Rowan goal to take a 4-1 lead and then senior forward Joe Pisko received a five minute major penalty and a game misconduct for checking from behind.
“It was a check from behind but it was kind of iffy,” Frain said. “They went into the corner to fish out the puck, I think Joey thought that he might’ve been turning put he just kind of pushed him before he turned.”
The Owls defense held strong on the Rowan five minute power play though and did not concede a goal. The period ended with Rowan in the lead 4-1.
As it has been all season starting off periods flat continued to be a problem for Temple. Much like the first goal of the game scored just one minute and 44 seconds into the game. Rowan scored in just the first two minutes and 22 seconds into the third period to make it 5-1.
While on the power play, sophomore defenseman Jason Lombardi was able to score from a shot from the point beating the Rowan goaltender to his glove hand side to trim Rowan’s lead to 5-2.
“They put up a lot of fight last night once they were down by a couple of goals,” Frain said. “They never gave up and the continued to climb up hill.”
Losing both games to Rowan this season is going to hurt Temple when it comes to seeding for the playoffs, but Frain said there is still a lot of hockey to be played.
“There is still a lot of time left,” Frain said. “I wanted to win last night just because I don’t like [Rowan] but we have a lot of time left and we have plenty of teams that are ranked above us that we haven’t played yet on our schedule.”
“But I’m not too worried about it. The only thing I care about is getting to Regionals,” Frain added.
Temple will next be in action Saturday night for a 7:00 p.m. night game away and Virginia Tech.
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