Land o' Lakes: Homecoming for five members of women's hockey team

Sometimes, heading home is just the thing to help someone get out of a rut. Five members of the women's hockey team hope that a trip to their home state — Minnesota — will end Princeton's recent slide.

The Tigers head to the Land of 10,000 Lakes — more specifically, St. Cloud, Minn. — for games tonight and tomorrow against St. Cloud (6-6-1), a non-conference rival.

Princeton, which has not yet played a game outside of the Eastern College Athletic Conference, currently stands at 2-5-1. The Tigers have been outscored 8-0 in their last two games by ECAC powers Harvard and Brown, and Princeton has only scored a total of three goals in its last four games.

"We're struggling to score goals," head coach Jeff Kampersal '92 said. "We're hoping to get on track [this weekend] for the other ECAC teams on our schedule."

The Tigers really have not played that badly during their recent cold streak. The problem has been finishing around the net. Perhaps a change of scenery could benefit a young Princeton team.

"A large part of the reason we're going to Minnesota," Kampersal said, "is that we have so many girls from there."

But the Tigers did lose Annamarie Holmes '01 — a Minnesota native and one of the primary reasons for scheduling the trip — to the national team. However, her sister, sophomore forward Nikola Holmes, still plays for Princeton and is one of the potential goal-scorers for the Tigers. Holmes has had a big impact on a number of games this season, including scoring a power-play goal and notching an assist against Boston College during Princeton's first victory of the year.

St. Cloud's transition will not simply roll over and allow Princeton to build up momentum for its return to the East Coast. The Huskies boast a solid, well-balanced team that plays a number of ECAC teams, including Niagara and Cornell.

"St. Cloud has two good forwards, a strong defense and a good goalie," Kampersal said.

The Huskies have also been playing well recently, keyed by the play of goaltender Laura Gieselman. Gieselman had a shutout in her most recent outing against Sacred Heart and has given up just one goal in each of the Huskies' three straight victories earlier this season. St. Cloud boasts a 4-2-1 record in its last seven contests.

Princeton, however, has solid goaltending of its own, and two goalies who have seen significant time this season are Minnesota natives. Sophomore Sarah Ahlquist and freshman Megan Van Beusekom have split the duties in net. One of the season's high points to date was Van Beusekom's shutout of Yale at Baker Rink Nov 19.

Two other Tigers — forwards Jessica Fedderley, a junior, and sophomore Sarah Brownlee — will also be making a homecoming of sorts this weekend. Both played hockey in Minnesota high schools.

Get the best of ‘the Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Scoring goals is the first priority now for Princeton, but when the goals start coming, they will probably come in bunches. In a three-game stretch early this season, the Tigers scored four times to tie Providence, netted two goals in the third period against the nation's top team — Dartmouth — and scored four times against Boston College. Since then, Princeton's defense and goaltending has tightened up, but the Tigers seem to have lost their knack for finding the back of the cage.

To get the Tigers going, someone needs to break the ice, and the elusive score will probably come from Princeton's top line. The line consists of junior captain Andrea Kilbourne, senior assistant captain Abbey Fox and Holmes.

The team hopes that returning some crucial members to familiar territory will add the emotional boost for Princeton to recapture its goal scoring in time for the heart of the critical ECAC schedule.