Hockey hits big at org. fair

Spoke to defenseman Sean Legnini this weekend and he was delighted to inform me that many Emersonians stopped by the team's booth at the organization fair (org. fair) last Friday.

More than 100 hockey fans pledged their support by adding their names to the team's e-mail list, and 8 students approached Legnini, Keeling and other members of the team about playing this Fall.

Two of those students are sophomores who were unaware the school even had a hockey team, and the other six are freshmen.

"One of the freshmen played varsity and his team went to the Flyers Cup, which is a tournament for the best high school team in eastern Pennsylvania," Legnini told me. "So he's probably pretty good."

It is unknown at this point how many or which of the 8 will actually play in games. The team's coach and captains will be assessing the new talent in the three practices leading up to next Sunday's season opener against Bentley.

Both captain Gwizdowski and assistant captain Keeling have indicated to me that anyone who shows enthusiasm and commitment will be given the opportunity to play.

2008 Season Preview

"Rise like Lions after slumber, in unvanquishable number," Percy Shelley once wrote in The Mask of Anarchy, a poem addressed to his fellow Englishmen after a massacre which took place at Manchester in 1819. Outgoing Emerson hockey captain Matt Porter might as well have delivered the same invocation to his rag tag squad at the end of their 2007-08 season.

The Lions were certainly asleep for the majority of last season, posting an abysmal overall 3-12-0 (1-8-0 NECHL) record, with two of those wins coming against the Rhode Island School of Design (GO NADS!). There were nights the team simply didn't have the unvanquishable numbers they needed to win, as players were in and out of the lineup, tied up with school projects rather than thugs from Berklee College of Music or Tufts University.

"We weren't really able to establish flow and coherence and identity," Porter admitted. "To be frank, I'm sort of left with a bad taste, because we didn't really win a lot."

But 2008 looks to be an exciting year of transition for the Lions. Leadership duties have been handed down to Alan Gwizdowski '09 and Pete Keeling '10, who are looking for more team commitment. Porter has faith the duo will keep the Lions rising -- both in level of skill and in the attention of the Emerson athletics department.

"Once you establish yourself as an actual club, I think, there's not as much wild growth," Porter said. "But the key is to keep moving forward and reaching new goals. And I'm confident Pete and Gwiz will do that."

Captain Gwizdowski (who served as assistant captain the past two seasons) says he plans to make the team stronger by getting them comfortable with each other and building chemistry.

"People get used to playing with certain other players on their lines," said Gwizdowski, who is known as "Gwiz" to friends and teammates. "When people can't make it to a game because of a film shoot, final project, etc. lines start getting switched and players skate at positions and with players they are not necessarily used to."

Newly minted assistant captain Keeling spent his summer taking care of organizational duties, scheduling practices and games and ordering jerseys. Managing a team is nothing new for Keeling, who helped build and run a team -- the Mendham Ice Bats -- in his home state of New Jersey. His experience in fundraising, team conditioning, logistics, and on-ice direction prepared him for his new role, which his former captain believes he earned through hard work and smart play.

"Pete came to me as a enthusiastic young player whose enthusiasm sometimes got the better of him," Porter said of Keeling. "He's grown into the leadership role a bit, but I feel he has a little way to go."

Keeling was one of the driving forces behind this year's condensed schedule, making ice hockey at Emerson a fall-only sport. The team will play a total of 14 league games in 2008; 7 at home (Simoni Rink, Cambridge) and 7 on the road between September and December. They will also participate in an exhibition game against a team to be announced, and square off against Berklee for the 3rd annual Boylston Cup, which the Lions have lost in their two previous bouts.

The condensed schedule comes to the relief of TV/Film students like Gwizdowski and Keeling, who plan to finish their Emerson studies at the school's Los Angeles campus. Had a condensed schedule been in place last season, the team would not have lost players like hard-hitting Jeff Duray or star goalie Greg Cohen, who left in the Spring semester to take classes in Kasteel Well, Netherlands.

Keeling hopes the team coalesces around his enthusiasm for being on the ice, because they'll be skating at least four times a week this Fall.

"More ice time helps us to progress as players and as a team," Keeling said. "We used to be on the ice once maybe twice a week, and we'd get rusty in our off time. This allows us to really hone in on our skills and tune our games to the fullest potential."

To get the team ready for the heavy workload, Keeling organized a pre-season weekend of work outs and team-building activities, which took place near the end of the summer on the Jersey Shore.

More on that in posts to come.