Labonte’s shutout gives Martlets new life
Pandas need to beat Dinos by at least eight goals to advance to final
Goaltender Charline Labonte earned her 80th career shutout with the Martlets on Friday as Mcgill University kept its title hopes alive at the Canadian Interuniversity Sport women’s hockey championship.
The two-time Olympic gold medallist stopped 26 shots to lead Mcgill to a 4-0 win over the host University of Alberta Pandas at Clare Drake Arena.
“I didn’t even know,” Labonte said of the milestone. “That’s the goaltender’s job. You need to give your team a chance to win.”
Mcgill, however, still needs a little help from the Pandas in Saturday’s 7 p.m. round-robin game against the Calgary Dinos in a rematch of the Canada West championship.
Calgary defeated Mcgill 1-0 in the first round-robin game Thursday and only needs a win to advance to Sunday’s championship final.
The Martlets can secure a berth in the gold-medal game if the Pandas beat the Dinos by less than eight goals in the final Pool B round-robin game.
Alberta needs at least an eight-goal victory based on the tiebreaking format of goals for and against during round-robin games in order to advance to the final. A three-goal win would qualify the Pandas for the bronze-medal game.
“I know we had to win by a high score to give ourselves a chance, now it’s out of our hands,” Labonte said. “We just wanted to have a good game, have no regrets at the end and give ourselves the best chance. It was a tight game and we exploded in the third.”
Labonte was at her best against Alberta on a night the Pandas simply couldn’t take advantage of their early scoring chances before watching the Martlets cruise to victory.
“She’s got a little bit of a mystique about her,” Pandas head coach Howie Draper said. “A goalie that’s that good and played at that level and been so successful at the CIS level, yeah I think you get that first goal in and you can believe that you can probably get another one.”
That first goal for the Pandas, however, never came.
Mcgill’s Gillian Ferrari broke the ice with only 22 seconds remaining in the first period when her screened point shot beat Pandas goalie Kaitlyn Chapman through the five hole.
“It just seems in a competition like this, and I guess any competition, whoever gets that first goal has a huge advantage and it would’ve been nice to have been able to bury some of those early ones. I think that could very well have changed the scope of the game, but we didn’t and they did and it kind of put us on our heels a little bit,” Draper said. “Unfortunately we weren’t able to keep the puck out of our net in the last two minutes of that period and it hurt us.”
After a scoreless second period, Mcgill came out strong in the third. Leslie Oles notched her first of the night after only three minutes and 54 seconds, then the Martlets got goals from Chelsey Saunders at 10:20 and Oles 2:12 later to seal the deal.
In the process, Chapman was chased from the net, giving way to Kanesa Shwetz to finish the game.
“We had nothing to lose, we had to play hard. We talked between the second and third (saying), ‘This is it, let’s make the best out of it’ ” Labonte said.
Laurier 3 UPEI 0
The top-seeded Wilfrid Laurier Golden Hawks bounced back in their second round-robin game, downing the fifth-seeded UPEI Panthers 3-0 in Pool A action.
The Golden Hawks suffered a 6-5 loss to the sixth-seeded University of Montreal Carabins in their tournament opener Thursday,
Laura Brooker’s goal 4:28 into the first period proved to be the winning goal for the Hawks.