Huskies Use Solid Team Effort To Defeat Holderness

New Hampton traveled up 93N to take on Lakes Regions Rival, Holderness, this evening. After tying their first Lakes Region game against Tilton, tonight’s game will be extremely important as the Huskies try to earn points in the Lakes Region as well as move up the Prep School Rankings. The game started off well for New Hampton, they won the opening faceoff, got the put deep and started to go to work against Holderness. Line after line came after the Holderness defense, hunting the puck, causing lots of turnovers that resulted in offensive opportunities for the Huskies. New Hampton’s hard work early on paid off when a Holderness defenseman took a penalty, putting the Huskies on the power play. Thirty seconds into the power play and four minutes into the game, Michael Kesselring’s point shot was deflected by Michael Kane right on the stick of Bradley Shaw, who buried the puck past the Holderness goaltender. The rest of the period saw New Hampton continue to dominate the play, but although having chances to score two or three more goals, the Huskies remained only up one after the first period of play. In the second period, New Hampton came out the same way, taking the play to Holderness for the first five minutes. Then two penalties in a row by the Huskies gave Holderness some opportunities on the power play, but the New Hampton penalty kill and Matt Sayles played strong to kill off both Holderness power plays. About a minute after killing off Holderness’s second power play, the hard work of Zak Lanoue and Alec Grace got the puck to the net, allowing Jake Dunlap to corral the rebound and beat the Holderness goaltender to put the Huskies up by two. The rest of the period saw New Hampton take back control of the game and pound shots at the Holderness net, but the score remained 2-0 after two periods of play. The third period, started off a little slow by both teams with not much offense being created. Then around the seven-minute mark, Lynden Breen picked up the puck at the New Hampton blueline, skated down the ice, made a slick move to go around a Holderness defenseman and slide the puck over to Michael Kesselring, who roofed the puck past the sprawling Holderness goaltender. After going up by three, the Huskies got into a little penalty trouble, taking two penalties within thirty seconds, to put Holderness on a five against three power play. Holderness was able to take advantage, scoring once to cut New Hampton’s lead to two. After the Holderness goal, the Huskies clamped down defensively, not allowing Holderness anything offensively and Bradley Shaw chipped in an open net goal assisted by Lynden Breen to ice the game. Matt Sayles was excellent in net stopping 26 of the 27 shots he faced to earn the win. New Hampton will look to continue their strong play as they take on another Lakes Region Rival, Proctor Academy, at home on Wednesday, January 10^th.