Like an overblown Harry Potter movie, Ohio’s hockey season can be divided in two.
The fall, during which the Bobcats went 18-7, was the time for team building, implementing a system and testing the limitations of players to see what they can do. The winter season, which begins Friday with a series against Illinois, comes with a brand new approach for coach Dan Morris and his team.
“Your second half is completely different,” Morris said. “It’s knowing now what you have, and you’ve worked on the things you need to work on. Now it’s more attention to detail, and it’s a different approach. Now you coach specifically for the opponent rather than just worrying about yourselves.”
In addition to more extensive game planning for opponents, Morris said he would be focusing specifically on the team’s power play and backchecking, two areas he’s found lacking so far this season.
Those areas, and getting his players back in the hockey mindset, will be his main concentration this week.
“We’ll get their heads going again. It’s kind of like a crash course,” he said. “We know you don’t win a championship in the first half of the year — you win it in the second half.”
The new year also brings new challenges for the Bobcats, as they begin troubleshooting the weaker parts of their game. One of those has been injuries, of which Ohio has had more than its fair share so far.
Only eight of the 26 players on the roster have played in all 25 games so far this season, with over half of the other 18 missing multiple games.
Those injuries caught up to the Bobcats in December, when they played a grueling stretch of five games in eight days that included a cross-country road trip to Arizona, where they lost all three games.
“It took a toll on our team, especially when we’d been playing with 16 or 17 players for so long,” Morris said. “Guys got worn out by playing so many minutes. When we needed them, they just didn’t have anything in the tank.”
But a three-week December break has allowed a beat-up Bobcat squad to recuperate. The breather was important for the injured players and those who played extra minutes in their absence.
“You start playing that many games, and you’re still practicing every day. It starts to wear on you mentally,” said Tyler Pilmore, who has played every game. “Three weeks off, you come back rejuvenated, and everybody looks great right now. So that three weeks is going to be crucial for our success moving on.”
Though some key players are still out, others have healed to the point where Morris expects to have a full lineup of 21 healthy bodies this weekend when his team takes on Illinois. That’s a luxury the coach has rarely enjoyed so far this season and is one he hopes to maintain throughout January, when Ohio will play eight games against top opponents.
“Ideally, I would want to play 25 (players) the first half of the year, rotate guys in, rotate guys out, play four lines, but that wasn’t the case,” Morris said. “So we’ll have to take a good look (this quarter) to make sure we aren’t overusing guys and burning them out before we need them.
“You just have to kind of assess as you go along.”
cd211209@ohiou.edu
