Canceled because of COVID
MSC won’t play its championship game this season
“It rips your heart out when you look into the eyes of the seniors because this is just a brutal blow for those kids.”
— Mount coach Matt Merten
WOONSOCKET — For the second time in as many years the Mount St. Charles hockey team was dealt a devastating body check on the eve of the state championship series.
Just hours before the No. 1 Mounties and No. 2 Bishop Hendricken were scheduled to open up the state final at Adelard Arena, the R.I. Interscholastic League called off the series and named both schools co-state champions after a Mount player tested positive for the coronavirus Thursday.
“It rips your heart out when you look into the eyes of the seniors because this is just a brutal blow for those kids,” Mount St. Charles coach Matt Merten said Friday afternoon.
“This is an incredible group of seniors and that just epitomizes everything you want in a student-athlete at Mount – pride in the school and hard work.
“What made it so much tougher this year is we weren’t together as a group when we found out about the cancellation. We had to do it over Zoom and you didn’t get the opportunity to hug the boys and be physically there to help them through this.”
For the second straight season Mount’s final game of the campaign was a scintillating semifinal victory over one of its two parochial rivals. The Mounties defeated No. 4 La Salle, 4-0, on Monday night at Adelard Arena to earn their second straight trip to the state final. Through contact tracing, it was later learned that one of the referees in that game also contracted the virus, which meant La Salle is also currently in quarantine.
If every Mount player tested negative over the next week, a title series could’ve theoretically started Thursday night at Adelard Arena before playing Game 2 at Thayer Ice Arena in Warwick on Friday night. There was initially hope Thursday night that the series could be rescheduled, but the RIIL ultimately decided to stick with the policy it adopted at the beginning of the school year when it came to teams in quarantine during the playoffs.
“There have been so many other teams who have their seasons interrupted or prematurely ended in the playoffs,” RIIL Executive Director Mike Lunney said. “It just wouldn’t have been fair for us to
take this particular series and not be consistent. From a consistency standpoint, this is what we said if a situation arose. Unfortunately, this is as close as we’ve gotten to a championship.”
On the eve of the state hockey tournament, No. 6 Barrington was forced into quarantine and had to forfeit its single-elimination game against Burrillville, while the No. 5 Warwick co-op girls squad had to forfeit its quarterfinal clash with No. 4 BPBV when one of the Titans JV players tested positive on the eve of the contest.
But, in those situations postponing a game for a week would’ve forced at least four other teams to change their schedules. In this case,
postponing the state final had no impact on any team outside of the Hawks and Mounties. Merten and Mount St. Charles president Alan Tenreiro said they understood the league’s position.
“I understand that the Interscholastic League has a thousand different variables that we don’t know everything they’re dealing with,” Merten said.
“We brought up some points about rescheduling and that it is a state championship,” Tenreiro said. “Some of the practical realities – and we are experiencing this in school, too – if there’s another positive case and it extends the quarantine for another week what do you do? We’re obviously disappointed,
but we understand the practical realities. This is one of those difficult conversations you have to have with kids, but we can only tell them how proud we are of them.”
Even though the two teams won’t meet for the state title this weekend, there’s still a chance the two teams will play an exhibition game at the end of next week at Adelard Arena. The game will be played to raise money for North Providence resident and Bishop Feehan senior AJ Quetta, who suffered a spinal-cord injury in a game earlier this season against Pope Francis.
“As we were trying to come up with creative ways to solve a really bad situation, I want to commend both schools and their administrations,” Lunney said. “Obviously, this is a very difficult scenario but we’re truing to make it into a positive.”
“They want to get back on the ice and see each other and get some closure on this season,” Merten said. “I’m sure the Hendricken kids do, too.”
Hendricken will now have won two of the last three state titles, while the Mounties will enter next season as two-time defending costate champions. One year ago, the Mounties were coming off an overtime victory over Hendricken to reach their first state final since 2016. Just a day before the series was supposed to start against La Salle, the RIIL canceled the rest of the winter postseason tournaments because of the onset of the pandemic.
Unlike Friday when the Mounties were in quarantine, last year the team had a chance to end the season by playing a cathartic intrasquad scrimmage at Adelard full of laughs, goals, hugs and tears.
“When I was talking to [senior captains] Cee-Jay [Laquerre] and Brendan [Donahue] after the fact, you just start choking up because it’s brutal for those two kids and all the seniors,” Merten said. “You try to do the adult thing and put everything in perspective for them. They’re going to be better individuals and better parents down the road because they dealt with all of these obstacles. I feel so bad for all of them because all of the extra effort they put in this season to make this all happen and reach this point.”