By Brandon Koch
The Niagara Purple Eagles club hockey team’s season came to an abrupt end when it lost to perennial rival and No. 17-ranked Robert Morris University, 5-2, in the American Collegiate Hockey Association ECHL semifinals in Rochester on Feb. 20.
The Colonials ended a magical run by the Purple Eagles, who finished their regular season with a 10-1 record before storming through the first round of the postseason with a 6-1 win over Mercyhurst.
Although the end result wasn’t what the team had hoped for, it’s certainly a step in the right direction, head coach Larry Brzeczkowskis aid.
“Well, we had 15 freshmen this year,” said the Purple Eagles’ bench boss, who is also the manager of Niagara’s Dwyer Arena. “We played a lot of them in the first semester. If you look at our record in the first semester, we struggled a little bit. We were getting our freshmen valuable playing time, and that paid dividends our second semester because we went 10-1 coming in to the playoffs.”
The Purple Eagles shot out of the starting gate at the beginning of the spring semester, registering wins in early January against the University at Buffalo, as well as rival Robert Morris.
Niagara’s only loss of the final 11 regular season contests came in a Feb. 6 matchup against Syracuse, where the Purple Eagles fell 4-3.
The team was paced by leading scorer and league MVP Nick Gollaher, who recorded 17 goals and 32 assists. The senior center became the school’s all-time leader in points with 171 over his four-year career.
The Purple Eagles’ 18 wins tied a team record.
“Everything was clicking, everything was working,” sophomore forward Tom Mooradian said. “Everything was happening because we were doing it for each other.”
Mooradian is one of three Lewiston-Porter graduates on the roster, along with Marc DeGiulio and Tyler Magliazzo. The sophomore winger finished off the 2009-10 campaign with four goals and nine assists in 24 games, and said team chemistry played a major role in the late-season surge.
“You could just tell the atmosphere on the ice and off the ice, everything was positive, everyone wanted to win and everyone understood that,” he said. “We really wanted to go out and extend our seniors’ seasons as best as possible.”
Brzeczkowski added the team’s captains did a stellar job in pulling the squad together. Some teams, he said, come to the rink, practice and don’t bother with each other outside the rink. Not this team.
“Away from the rink they hung out no matter what they were doing,” Brzeczkowski said. “It brought the team closer together. The captains pretty much took the ball and ran with that, so hats off to the captains for bringing the team together.”
Brzeczkowski added that the program is getting better every year on and off the ice, making key additions to the coaching staff while signing a deal with a sports apparel company to acquire team issued equipment.
Earlier this season, the Purple Eagles hit the ice in the great outdoors. Brzeczkowski was able to schedule a game against local rival Canisius College’s junior varsity team at the Time Warner Classic Rink in East Aurora — the same rink used for the inaugural NHL Winter Classic at Ralph Wilson Stadium.
Although NU’s club team may not get the same perks as the Division I team does, Brzeczkowski said his program is making the proper strides in attracting better recruits.
“We’ve taken our program the next couple of steps to keep up with the big teams in the country, and that’s allowed us to get better recruits, which we have coming in next year,” he said. “I expect us to be an even better team next year.”
