YOUTH TEAMS HEADED TO NATIONALS
The Penguins aren’t the only hockey team from this region that will be chasing a championship this spring. Not even close. They’re part of the minority that will be doing it with a male lineup, though.
The Penguins Elite 14Under squad, which will contend for the Tier 1 national title April 5-10 in Charlotte, N.C., falls into that category, too.
However, no fewer than three female teams from the Penguins Elite program — the 19U, 16U and 14U groups — will compete for Tier I championships April 5-9 in Marlborough, Mass.
What’s more, the 19U, 16U and 14U squads from the Steel City Selects girls program will compete for Tier II U.S. titles, also in Marlborough. It will be the third consecutive trip to nationals for each.
Chris Stern, who coaches the 19-and-under Penguins Elite club, said it’s no surprise — or accident — that this area produces so many strong female teams.
“The foundation that’s been laid over the past 10 or 15 years is very strong, and now you have former players coming back,” he said. “You take the history of our program and its predecessor program and then you have the girls getting back involved, it sort of feeds off itself. It creates a community.”
Two members of that community are former Robert Morris players Ashley Vesci, who is Stern’s assistant, and Cobina Delaney, coach of the 16U squad.
Stern said that qualifying for the national championship tournament was his team’s objective entering the season “because of the success of our kids in the past.”
His roster is a combination of returning players, newcomers from the 16U team that played in the national title game in 2017 and some from Columbus, Ohio, who signed on when there weren’t enough players to field a team there.
Stern, noting that his club is 8-1 in shootouts this season, chuckled and said, “we would like to get in a shootout with any team we play.” He wasn’t necessarily kidding, though, because goaltending will be a key part of whatever his team is able to accomplish.
Those duties presumably will fall to Gwyneth Philips, who Stern said has earned a scholarship to Northeastern and “has been one of the top goalies in her age bracket for several years.”
The team’s formula for success in Massachusetts, he said, will be pretty basic: “Play the same way we’ve been playing, which is [having] good goaltending and just playing a very solid, 200-foot game. Being opportunistic and having tremendous special teams.”
Sound fundamentals have been critical to the success of the 14-Under boys’ squad, as well, according to coach Brian Mueller.
“We work hard,” he said. “That’s kind of the cornerstone of our team makeup. We work hard, we possess pucks, we try to play the right way. We try to not cheat the game, just do things the right way.
“We’re up-tempo, play at a pretty fast pace. We try to play as a five-man unit, so all five guys are on the same page and working together.”
The approach has worked pretty well. Mueller’s team enters its tournament as the No. 2ranked group in the nation.
Mueller said the squad’s goaltending, handled by Michael Brown and Justin Cataldo, “is extremely solid, probably one of the best tandems in the country.”
Those goalies work behind a defense corps that includes the likes of Jack Musa and Carter Schade, while forward Colby Saganiuk — the grandson of former Penguins winger Rocky Saganiuk — is, in Mueller’s estimation, one of the top [players born in 2003] in the country.”
The Penguins Elites’ primary competition in Charlotte figures to come from the usual powers — teams such as Compuware and Little Caesars from Michigan, the Mid-Fairfield (Conn.) Jr. Rangers and the New Jersey Colonials — but Mueller believes his team can hold its own with any opponent.
“The way the team has jelled and come together and bought in, we have as good a chance as anyone to go and win a national championship if we play the right way and play our style of hockey,” he said. “I think we’re good.”