Vibes are a very real thing in sports. A team can have all the talent in the world, but if their vibes are off and doubt starts to creep in, it can unravel an entire season. There are countless stories from every sport of locker rooms that lose that sense of internal belief and crumble, wasting the talent they had assembled to achieve their goals.
Penn State men’s hockey reached a tipping point after an embarrassing defeat on Friday night against No. 2 Michigan. The Nittany Lions surrendered an early shorthanded goal, fell behind 4-0 early in the second period, and wound up losing 7-1 in one of the program’s worst defeats in recent history.
After the game, head coach Guy Gadowsky didn’t bother entering the locker room, telling injured defenseman Cade Christenson that he wasn’t going in there, letting the players sort it out themselves.
“After [Friday’s game], it was a players’ only meeting,” Reese Laubach said during postgame media on Saturday. “It wasn’t with the coaches, it was man-to-man, guy-to-guy. We need to snap out of it. That was two games in a row we got kicked in the mouth, one at home. It’s pretty embarrassing, and we all notice that.”
In that locker room, there was a dialogue between the players. It wasn’t a lecture from a coach, it wasn’t the captain whipping everyone into shape, it wasn’t awkward silence. At a pivotal point in the season, after three consecutive demoralizing losses to teams that Penn State is competing with at the top of the Big Ten, everyone had a voice.
“Tons of guys stepped up,” said freshman forward Shea Van Olm on Monday. “Dane [Dowiak] started it off by making it an open conversation, and we shut all of the doors and talked as a group with a mix of all ages, freshmen, seniors, and sophomores. Ultimately, the message was ‘It’s a must-win’, and we need to play our brand of hockey, play hard, and play harder for each other.”
But in times like those, a leader needs to step up, and that’s what Dowiak did, leading the open conversation that sounded more like soul-searching for the Nittany Lions after being outscored 12-1 in their two previous games. Despite being part of one of the smaller leadership groups Penn State has had in its brief time as a Division I program, both he and associate captain Jarod Crespo have been invaluable to the younger players.
“He’s our captain, he’s huge for us,” said Van Olm. “Not only as a team, but just as a freshman class coming in. He’s been really good to me and really good to our young guys, pulling us all into the group. He’s our most vocal guy, and we look up to the way he leads.”
“He’s been awesome since I got here,” freshman defenseman Nolan Collins said about Crespo. “He’s been really approachable. He’s an unbelievable guy and he’s there to answer my questions, and being a right shot defenseman like myself, it’s been easy to go and ask him any questions we have about what it’s like on the road, what time we start warm-ups, and stuff like that.”
After Friday’s game, Gadowsky remarked that he was concerned that the team was too worried about making plays with the puck, rather than getting the puck and giving themselves to an overall team effort. It’s clear that, in that conversation between the players, they wanted to play more for each other in the rematch on Saturday.
From the opening puck drop, Penn State played with more poise and effort, limiting turnovers and reducing the pressure on Josh Fleming in net. While Michigan had its moments and eventually rallied to cut a 3-0 deficit into a one-goal game, the Nittany Lions hunkered down and got to lift a gigantic weight off their shoulders with the statement victory.
“This was a big win,” Gadowsky said postgame. “You saw the effort, [Gavin] McKenna going hard at the end of his shift to beat out an icing, Misa the same way, so many guys were blocking shots and taking hits to make plays, really playing for each other again. That was a big part of our success last year and it’s really nice to have that tonight.”
It was a “big program win,” as Gadowsky put it. With the mountain of expectations placed upon them, they needed this kind of effort to reinstate not only the fanbase’s faith, but their own faith in themselves.
The total team buy-in was evident in the physicality of the team’s play. Look no further than Gavin McKenna, the dynamic, playmaking forward who nobody will confuse with a bruiser or enforcer. After getting crunched on the glass in the offensive zone in the second period, McKenna blew up a Michigan defender making an outlet pass, much to the delight of Pegula Ice Arena and his teammates.
“I think that’s probably the biggest hit of the night,” said Gadowsky. “He handles himself so well. He’s a hockey player, he’s just a hockey player. Not sure there’s anything he can’t do.”
“I think when you have an offensive leader like Gavin playing the physical game, that maybe he’s not playing every shift because of his role and what he brings to this team, it fires us up,” said Van Olm. “You see a 17-year-old kid get physical and lay a big hit, it’s huge for us, we were screaming on the bench. It was awesome.”
“That was actually awesome,” said Collins. “We had the meeting after the game on Friday, and we thought we needed to up our intensity, and Gavin stepping up like that and throwing a big hit definitely got everyone going. It had me on the bench standing up, and to see a guy like that, with that kind of skill, do something like that, elevates the whole team.”
McKenna’s hit came before any goals were scored, but Penn State was able to light the lamp twice afterwards to end the period. If that can be a catalyst going forward, it’ll pay dividends as the team enters its final series before a month-long break against Minnesota.