Postseason begins with WCHA tourney
The Ohio State women’s hockey team has followed up the program’s first national championship by winning 28 of its 34 regular-season games while remaining the No. 1 ranked team in the country for all but one week of a challenging Western Collegiate Hockey Association schedule.
In fact, coach Nadine Muzerall’s club managed another program first this year: winning the WCHA regularseason title.
But there’s no time to reflect on that accomplishment.
“It’s tough because you can’t even celebrate it, right?” Muzerall said. “You win it Sunday, then, boom, Monday practice because you got playoffs on Friday. So it’s something that you’re prideful of and then you got to move on quickly.”
Ohio State is indeed proud of last season’s national title. But the chance of repeating isn’t something the team thinks much about.
“It’s pretty unrealistic from the beginning to have that goal,” Ohio State graduate senior forward Emma Maltais said. “For us, we’ve really been focusing on our weekend performance day in and day out.”
That focus put Ohio State in a position to secure its first-ever regular-season title heading into the final weekend of the regular season at Wisconsin.
And while Ohio State graduate senior defenseman Sophie Jaques admitted the team wasn’t at its best against the sixth-ranked Badgers, she believes the Buckeyes showed they could still find a way to win without showing that “extra level.”
Starting the weekend with a 6-5 overtime loss, Ohio State earned the 3-1 win Sunday, scoring three goals in the final five minutes to claim the Juliane Bye Cup.
“We are never out of it,” Jaques said. “We can always fight back no matter what. … To show that we have that strength, that we’re never out of a game until the final buzzer sounds, I think, is really good for us going into playoffs. No matter what happens, we know at any point in the game, we can win.”
As the postseason gets underway, nothing really changes for Ohio State
And with an older roster, including five “super seniors” in Jaques, Maltais, Paetyn Levis, Gabby Rosenthal and Madison Bizal, the Buckeyes have a level of comfort and experience most teams don’t have heading into tournament play.
“All it is now, it’s just higher stakes,” Maltais said. “A lot of us have that confidence. We’ve been there. That’s the perks of having a lot of older players on your team and knowing what it’s like to play in a conference championship, to play in a national championship.”
Ohio State begins its postseason this weekend, hosting No. 8 seed Bemidji State in the quarterfinals of the WCHA tournament with a best-of-three series Feb. 24-26 at the OSU Ice Rink.