For Moon, D-2 is better than nothing
Tri-State Sports & News Service
Moon is two wins away from a PIHL championship after a 9-2 win against Central Valley Monday in the opening round of the playoffs.
If it wins, it won’t be the Penguins Cup it will be raising on March 19 and the UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex and that’s perfectly acceptable. A few months ago, it didn’t look like the Tigers would be playing at all.
“It was definitely hard when coach [Joseph Sell] sat us down and told us there’s a possibility we might be dropping out and not have a team this year,” Moon senior defenseman Shane Handlovitch said. “Being my senior year, it was hard, so I started talking to kids and trying to get kids to play. Everyone has embracedit and we’ve had a greatseason so far.”
Because of the success the program had over the previous three seasons, Moon was about to be moved up to Class 3A and would have been the 11th team in the classification. In this way, each team would have played 10 games and the top eight would have qualified for the postseason.
A few days before the annual realignment was officially announced, however, seven players opted not to return for the Tigers, leaving the team short of players and in danger of putting theentire season on hiatus.
“It was just a roller coaster of events, losing 13 seniors from last year and we were coming in for tryouts and losing seven kids,” Moon junior Shawn Hytla said. “It’s just a great feeling from where we were then to wherewe are now.”
Instead of folding, Moon reached out to several other schools and brought in players to fill out the squad. Because the roster was not solely comprised of competitors from one school, the team was deemed ‘impure’ under PIHL bylaws and the co-op was moved from Class 3A down to the Division 2 developmental league.
It was a much different dynamic for a team that went 16-2-1 and won the Class 2A West Division in the 2016-17 season. Instead of a veteran unit that had been together for several years including youth hockey leagues, Moon was now a mish-mash of players who, aside from Handlovitch and Hytla — the only two returning starters from last season — had either junior varsity experience with the program or none at all.
“It wasn’t easy, but the kids that stuck with it are committed and I think you need to have that first,” Sell said. “When you graduate 13 seniors and what’s left of yourJV team is playing varsity, I give a lot of credit to these kids because the ones that left us before the season, I don’t think they wanted the challenge that we’vehad.”
Not only did Moon compete, the team thrived. The Tigers finished the regular season with the best record in Division 2 (17-1-0-0), are the top seed in the playoffs and will take on Connellsville at 7:15 p.m. Monday at the Robert Morris University Island Sports Center.
Still, despite the fact the team won’t be competing for a Penguins Cup, it is in the semifinals and vying for a title. Considering that Moon has never won a hockey championship in the top three classifications, taking the Division 2 trophy wouldn’tbe all that bad.
“We definitely have a team that handles ourselves in Double-A and it just sucks that we’re playing down here in Division 2,” Handlovitch said. “But I definitely think we have a team that can go all the way.”