Midweek Roundup 11.16.22
We preview a massive WoHo roadtrip and a big weekend series on the men’s side with Minny. Then, we catch up with Minnesotan Wolverine Jackson Hallum
With snow flurries and winter temperatures beckoning, the weather feels appropriate for a massive week of hockey at the University of Michigan.
The men’s team, ranked third in the country, hosts second-ranked Minnesota for a rare Thursday-Friday set at Yost.
Freshman forward T.J. Hughes suggested after Monday’s practice that the short week doesn’t cause drastic changes for the Wolverines: “Maybe [it] just kind of speeds up the practice week. Usually Monday we do it a little bit lighter—focus on some more games and scoring and just keep the mood high, but the mood’s always high. The week will just be a day ahead, so today was a bunch of little battles, but it doesn't change much, just kind of the days.”
With the Maize and Blue having dropped points (either in the Big Ten standings or the nebulous computer simulation that is the PairWise) in three consecutive weekends, they will be gunning for a clean sweep over the Gophers to re-assert their presence in a Big Ten race that figures to be hotly contested.
Hughes added that there is an excitement accompanying playing in a league as competitive as the Big Ten, in which six of seven teams are currently ranked: “You’re playing the best of the best every night, so it’s hard not to get up for the games.”
As big as the weekend will be on the men’s side, we’ll begin in earnest with the Michigan women, whose impending road trip to Utah figures to be massive on and off the ice.
WoHo Wednesday
This weekend, the University of Michigan’s women’s hockey team flies to Utah for its first “big trip” since before the pandemic began. Traditionally, the team looked to take one significant road trip each season—in the past a bus ride east to take on schools like UMass or a flight out to Colorado.
After COVID canceled their 2020-21 season and COVID-related restrictions made logistics for such a trip untenable a year ago, the Wolverines will again be taking on UMass, but this time they’ll be doing it at the Beehive Showcase, hosted by the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
Michigan will fly west Thursday afternoon, arriving in the early evening Mountain Time for three games over the weekend. The team will play Montana State Friday, Utah Saturday, and then UMass on Sunday. All three games will unfold at the Salt Lake City Sports Complex, adjacent to the Utes’ campus.
As head coach Jenna Trubiano explains it, the trip came together through discussions with team leaders about ambitions for the season: “We had a conversation, I think it was probably like March or April, and I basically came up with a proposal for [elected] team leadership and said I think we should do this trip. I think a big part of our student-athlete experience is having these big trips and going places that students haven’t gone before. We also have a couple players from California, so it’s obviously a lot shorter of a flight for [families] to get out there, so it was just a unique experience that we’re able to fortunately work into our schedule.”
For Trubiano, the journey is at once an opportunity for the team to share the bond of the program’s longest road trip in years but also a vital step toward improving its profile.
“It was a great week of practice last week to kind of rest, have some fun, and we have some injuries,” Trubiano said over the phone Sunday. “Some students are recovering from our Lake State series, but we should be all healthy by the time we have to leave on Thursday, so everybody’s excited. It’s always fun to travel as a team. We’ve had one overnight road trip so far, which was our series at Lake State in October, but we’ve got some exciting things planned, and I know some families are making the trip out to Salt Lake City, so it’ll be really fun.”
At the same time, Trubiano’s team, which came in at #6 when the ACHA released its initial rankings last week (a ranking it held in this week’s edition of the polls), will travel with a clear sense of purpose. For Trubiano and company, taking leaps like the trip out to Utah is a necessary step in continuing to build the program.
For the Michigan women, costs of basic expenses like transportation, trainers, referees, and ice time are rising, so unfortunately, an increase in budget (and therefore greater demand for some combination of fundraising and students paying higher fees) is a necessary step in the short-term.
“Given the fact that the first ranking came out and we’re in the top ten for the first time since I think 2016 or 2017, we’re doing something right in terms of our strength of schedule,” explains Trubiano. “That plays into the computer ranking system, so this is going to be hopefully something moving forward that inevitably we’re gonna have to keep playing stronger teams and traveling outside of our conference [the CCWHA, of which friend of the newsletter Sue McDowell is commissioner] to show how strong we are in our conference. So for us to be able to do that, our budget is going to increase. It’s unfortunate this year that everything is so much more expensive, even going to the grocery store is just ridiculous. For buses, we’ve had to pay quadruple what we budgeted for because of some factors outside of our control. We’re at a point now here we’re growing, we have a ton of momentum right now, we need to be doing these things, but financially, we’re self-funded for the most part and then obviously fundraising is a huge part of being able to do these trips.”
In this quotation, the kind of work Trubiano describes is perhaps foreign to most Michigan programs. At a school that prizes little if anything above its traditions, most teams have little work to do as far as raising awareness for the athletic efforts they put forth; the iconic Maize and Blue block M does a lot of that work itself. Michigan’s women’s hockey team cannot count on that same luxury though and thus must undertake labor that is more familiar to small schools on the fringes of FBS football’s Group of Five than a world-renowned Big Ten research university.
In those efforts, support from the University of Michigan itself is, in a word, scant. When asked whether the school has provided much aid in combating rising costs, Trubiano first chuckles at what she calls a “loaded question.”
She goes on to explain that the present budget for club sports within the school cannot possibly accommodate that demand. With thirty club sports teams and a budget of roughly $80,000 for all of them combined, the present structure at a university level allows no leeway for increased funding for women’s hockey.
“Our ice bill per year is anywhere from $35-40K alone at Yost,” points out Trubiano. “So [money from club sports] covers a fraction of our practice time.”
Here, the bureaucratic separation of club sports from the athletic department affords the University of Michigan a self-constructed and arbitrary bulwark against allegations of under-funding women’s hockey. “There’s no room in the budget,” club sports might say, as a university-owned facility charges a club sport’s team—composed of tuition-paying students—at said university roughly half the budget meant for all thirty teams every year for access.
Trubiano believes that “something’s likely being discussed at the university level” with regard to a potential budgetary increase, but she is not party to those conversations. “They’re not going to tell me specifics, but I’m also one to keep asking the same questions over and over again,” Trubiano says.
As McDowell told us a week ago, making the leap to a Division I program with Division I facilities would require significant capital investment from the University. However, providing basic and essential services to club sports teams like women’s hockey feels as though it is a no brainer from a student safety perspective and could come at the cost of little more than a rounding error for a school with a $17.3 billion endowment. As Trubiano puts it, “why wouldn’t you want to protect your student-athletes at any level?” by footing the bill for basics like trainers and transportation.
Despite the instability and frustration that can accompany life away from the rink, Trubiano is thrilled with one of the team’s best starts in years, which provides a reminder that the process is working.
“One of our team goals for this season is to make the national tournament, in which the top ten teams go,” Trubiano says. “I hope this [strong start] shows our team, our program, and our followers that we’re doing the right things in practice, we’re doing the right things on the ice and off the ice. We’re scheduling the right amount of games against the right opponents to build our strength of schedule. So I think this is really just affirmation that we’re doing the right things.”
In the upcoming road trip specifically, Trubiano sees another opportunity to affirm her team’s process. “This is a huge opportunity for us to make a statement,” she says. “We’re playing the University of Utah again, we’re playing UMass-Amherst, who is ranked seventh, so the games are going to be really great.”
Perhaps most exciting for Trubiano is the sense that her team is continuing to grow as the season progresses: “We’re at a point in the season now where we’re getting better at practice. We’re getting better every game. Obviously, our goaltender Sandrine [Ponnath] has been playing phenomenal, so we just need to keep building that momentum. We’ve got to produce goals, so we’re going to be looking to work on more creative ways to get offense generated in practice this week and also special teams, because our power play was just not great [against Lake Superior State]. We’ve got the skill, we’ve got the smarts, we just have to execute.”
Scouting the Gophers
In Minnesota, the Michigan men’s team will find a foe that bears a striking resemblance to itself: as blue-blooded as it gets in college hockey with a loaded roster playing a style that reflects its future NHL talent.
Bob Motzko’s Gophers will travel to Ann Arbor with an 8-4-0 record. Three of those losses came during a four-game September stretch—falling to Minnesota State in Mankato, a home split with North Dakota, and then a loss at Ohio State. Fortunately for Motzko and company, the temporary skid precedes an active run of four wins in five games, including a sweep over Notre Dame. Last weekend, the Gophers fell Friday at home to Penn State before a Saturday night victory.
Like Michigan, Minnesota has spent the first month-plus of its season flirting with the nation’s number one ranking, but never holding it down for very long.
A talented freshman class is already paying dividends for the Gophers, with winger Jimmy Snuggerud leading the team in scoring with eight goals and four assists through twelve games. Fellow freshman Logan Cooley is not far behind with three goals and seven assists, while the two dynamic freshmen’s running mate on the top line (sophomore Matthew Knies) has pitched in seven goals and four assists.
In net, senior Justen Close (who took over for the starting duties last January when the Carolina Hurricanes signed erstwhile Gopher starter Jack LaFontaine due to an emergency organizational goalie shortage) has done the heavy lifting for Motzko’s team. In eleven games played, Close has an impressive .923 save percentage and 1.88 goals against average.
A Word with Minnesotan-in-Residence Jackson Hallum
Freshman forward Jackson Hallum is one of two Minnesotans playing for the Wolverines (the other, senior defenseman Keaton Pehrson). When we request Hallum for an interview after Monday’s practice, we are warned that he tends to be the last Wolverine off the ice, so we might have to wait a bit.
Hallum lives up to this billing, lingering with a cadre of freshmen including Kienan Draper, Gavin Brindley, Brendan Miles, Rutger McGroarty, and Tyler Shea. The skaters amongst that number engage in a spirited shooting game on Shea, before McGroarty and Hallum take turns soft tossing one another pucks while wielding their sticks as baseball bats—“just kind of playing around” as Hallum puts it.
The Eagan, Minnesota (“The Onion Capital of the United States,” per Wikipedia) native says “there’s definitely a little extra motivation” in taking on his home-state program this weekend. “It’ll be a weird game because I know a lot of those guys—I grew up playing with and against them, so it’ll be cool, but I obviously want to beat them really badly.” Specifically, Hallum cites freshmen Gopher forwards John Middlestadt and Brody Lamb as familiar combatants, both of whom he played against growing up and with last year for the USHL’s Green Bay Gamblers.
Hallum knows the pride Minnesota and Minnesotans take in keeping the Gopher roster stocked with in-state talent, but he was after a different college experience. “Everyone goes to Minnesota from Minnesota, so it’s kind of just something different for me to spread my wings and go somewhere else.”
That Hallum invokes flight as a metaphor to explain his choice is perhaps fitting for a player whose speed commands attention whenever he steps on the ice.
As Hallum tells it, speed is nothing new with or without skates, saying “I’ve always been a fast runner, so I think that just kind of carried over.”
He adds that with help from his head coach he believes he is still working to refine his already formidable technique: “I think my stride just came naturally, but there’s definitely a lot of stuff I can still work on with my skating. Like Nar has been teaching me some stuff on stopping, switching angles, and how to manipulate guys better.”
In making his college decision, the freshman had hockey in mind, but he also saw a broader appeal to collegiate life in Ann Arbor: “The whole Big Ten experience, the football team, everything here. Academics are really good. Obviously, Minnesota has good academics, but Michigan just has a great network with alumni and sports teams.”
Though Hallum elected to depart from his home state to continue his hockey career, that shouldn’t be confused for a rejection of the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes’ hockey-mad culture. Hallum describes Minnesota high school hockey as “the coolest thing in the country” and says he was “fortunate enough to play in the Tournament [no further descriptors necessary] four years in a row.”
Hallum did so for St. Thomas Academy in Mendota Heights, not far from St. Paul. He says that he stays in touch with his high school coaches and that “they even watch my shifts sometimes and give me advice.” He adds once more “it’s really cool the culture that Minnesota has for high school hockey.”
As for the games themselves, Hallum anticipates an exciting weekend. “It’ll be cool to play Minnesota because they’re a lot like us and they like to play offense. It’ll be a really fast paced game, and I think the fans will love it.”
Belated Samoskevich Birthday
We’ll close today by wishing a belated happy birthday to Mackie Samoskevich and his twin sister Maddy, who turned twenty yesterday.
What better way to celebrate than by re-reading our profile of the Connecticutian winger and his family from last Friday. Some of the stats are now out-of-date after a multi-goal weekend, but the sentiments persist.
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