Midweek Roundup 11.9.22
We dwell briefly on last weekend’s trip to PSU before previewing ND, exploring the notion of Nar as a warm demander, recapping the Michigan women’s sweep of LSSU, and catching up with Rob Rassey
After a tempestuous weekend in State College, Brandon Naurato’s young University of Michigan men’s hockey team has its collective eyes set on a trip to Notre Dame this weekend.
Despite the apparent moments of imperfection against the Nittany Lions, Michigan departed Pegula Ice Arena last Saturday night with a confidence born from rebounding after Friday’s substandard showing.
“I think you’ve just kind of got to lean on each other and use each other for support and come back together as a group [after Friday’s loss],” explains sophomore forward Dylan Duke. “It starts with our leadership group and our captains and then has a trickle effect on everyone in the locker room.”
Duke explains that he and the rest of the Wolverine skaters focused on putting forth a better effort last Saturday for goaltender Noah West, the one player in Maize and Blue who could take pride in his Friday performance:
“He was our best player on Friday night; he deserved better. I think everyone in the locker room knows that and can take responsibility off his shoulders. [Friday’s loss] wasn’t on him; that was completely on us. And then for him to do it again on Saturday night was unbelievable. I think that goes to show his character and never complaining that he’s not the starting goalie. I was really really happy for him, and I think it builds confidence for our team.”
Though the team could ultimately draw confidence from the valiant performances of its backup netminder and its collective resilience, Michigan will want to secure more than just two of a possible six B1G standings points this weekend.
Scouting the Irish
When the Wolverines travel to South Bend, they will collide with a Notre Dame team in an unusual state of flux. Throughout Jeff Jackson’s tenure, the Irish have played a tight-checking, counter-attacking style, posing problems for more talented B1G foes by grinding games to a halt and then snapping into offensive life when the opportunity presents itself. A year ago, Jackson’s team surrendered a scant 2.05 goals per game.
As we noted in last week’s B1G KWL charts, Notre Dame’s traditional stifling defense has been much kinder to its opponents this season. Ten games in, the Irish have conceded four or more goals on seven occasions, a figure that already matches the total from last year’s forty-game season. Throw in an offense that is putting up just 2.4 goals per game of its own, and you have the recipe for four wins from ten games.
It is not as though the Irish’s defensive woes are a byproduct of poor goaltending. This season, senior Ryan Bischel inherited the starting duties from Matt Galajda (off to Djugardens of the Swedish Allsvenskan). Through ten games, Bischel’s .932 save percentage would seem to merit better than the .500 record he carries.
Last weekend, the Irish were swept in Minneapolis at the hands of Minnesota. Across the two games Friday and Saturday, the Gophers outscored Jackson’s bunch 7-1.
If there has been a bright spot for the Irish offensively through ten games, it has been Ryder Rolston. The son of former Lake Superior State and New Jersey Devil Brian, Rolston has four goals and five assists through ten games. Michigan fans may remember him with antipathy for his Friday night overtime winner at Yost last November.
Even if the Irish have struggled through the season’s opening month, Jeff Jackson’s team has been “Michigan’s kryptonite” to use Naurato’s phrasing for long enough that they cannot be overlooked. Since Jeff Jackson took over in 2005-06, the Irish have a 28-22 record against Michigan, including a 2-1 mark in the NCAA Tournament.
In preparing for the trip to South Bend, Naurato reiterates the importance of being able to meet the different challenges posed by opponents’ various styles. Against Notre Dame, the Wolverines will have to find a way through the quick sand that is Jackson’s 1-3-1 neutral zone.
As Naurato lays it out, “You have to be able to lay pucks behind. That’s Michigan’s Kryptonite for the last twenty years [regardless of opponent]. That’s why I’m so focused on playing different styles. Michigan has always been able to score on the power play and off the rush, but when that’s not there, how do you create offense? You can’t just be a one trick pony.”
As for the plan to find a path through, Naurato explained “They’re trying to force you to dump pucks. If there’s spacing to play fast, and you don’t allow them to get into their structure, then you can have more controlled entries [into the offensive zone]. And if you play slow, then all their guys are above you, and they’re in their structure and then you need to put it behind them.”
The Learning Curve: Lessons from State College & Nar as Warm Demander
In reflecting on his team’s up-and-down weekend visiting Penn State, Brandon Naurato expressed pride in its resilience and continued to underscore the fact that his young group (and in some ways its coach) is learning on the job.
In commenting on the disappointment of Friday’s effort before Saturday’s rebound, Naurato said “Guys stepped up [between Friday and Saturday], which was awesome. You don’t know with a young group so early in the season, how they’re gonna fight through it.”
Coaches often talk about drawing lessons from defeat, but is the defeat itself necessary? Can those same lessons come from victory?
As Naurato sees it, finding paths to self-improvement out of setbacks is a way of managing the inevitability of failure in sports: “You prep so that you win every game, but [learning from losses] is the optimistic way of looking at it. Anytime you lose, or you fail, you can learn from it. How are you going to respond? If you learn from it, if you come out and fix those things, it’s a huge win. If you don’t, you have a problem, and how much pain do you want to go through until you figure it out?”
Zooming out from the immediate context of last weekend’s mixed results in State College, Naurato implicitly invokes the pedagogy of the warm demander. In unpacking the work he does to help his charges grow, the interim head coach highlights a balance between instilling confidence in a young group eager to prove itself at the collegiate level and striking the right instructional notes to help the individual players and collective team strive toward their potential.
As a teacher, Naurato seeks to develop relationships with his players that reflect a mutual respect, relationships that position personal and team success as an expectation due to a shared understanding that those lofty goals are within reach.
“It’s just letting them know you believe, and then at the same time, we have to be firm and hold them accountable.”
Because of his confidence in his players’ statuses as “students of the game,” keen to hone their craft, Naurato sees no benefit to berating players over mistakes or failure. Instead, his objective is to set a struggling player on a path toward improvement.
“It’s just staying the course of building them up without just telling them what they want to hear. There’s no reason for me to just [say] ‘You’ve got to work harder. You’re shit.’ If you get a ‘B’ in a class and I was like ‘What the hell? You gotta study harder, you’re not smart. What are you thinking?’ You’re going to be like ‘What are you talking about? Give me some solutions. What am I missing?’”
As part of that process, Naurato wants to make sure that his players feel empowered to express their thoughts: “I’m wide open to what guys think. I want the kids to challenge me. I want them to tell me what they love or don’t like. That doesn’t mean I’m gonna change it, but I want to know what they’re thinking. I want them to have a voice.”
He adds that one benefit of doing video work with individual players or lines rather than in a full team setting is the way it invites dialogue; as Naurato puts it, “you can let them talk and ask questions” in a more intimate setting, which makes it easier to check players’ understanding.
In laying out his approach, Naurato makes clear that he doesn’t profess to have all the right answers in his first year as a head coach and that like his team, there are parts of his job he is still learning: “This is all new for me. I probably overthink so many things because it’s new, versus having ten, fifteen years of experience where I’ve failed and then I can learn from it.”
The first-time head coach can’t always be certain when an optional practice is appropriate or how to strike the perfect balance between experimentation and allowing chemistry to develop in his line combinations.
Despite an inherent degree of uncertainty in learning on the job, Naurato prioritizes trying a variety of approaches to find the right fit: “I’d rather overthink it now and try a bunch of different things, so that I do learn versus being a one-trick pony.”
As is becoming a weekly theme here at Gulo Gulo, Brandon Naurato brings a unique commitment to making the notion of coach as teacher more than a cliché to his post.
WoHo Wednesday
Last weekend, the University of Michigan women’s hockey team completed its season sweep of Lake Superior State with victories on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. The Wolverines did not concede in either game, cruising to a 5-0 win Saturday before triumphing 2-0 Sunday on the strength of a Cara Kolwich goal with fewer than three minutes to play, before Katie German added an empty netter to cinch the sweep. Kolwich and German, both blue liners whose height provides an air of intimidation, helped the Wolverines ward off a valiant Laker effort Sunday before taking control in no small part thanks to the duo’s ability to control the game’s tempo with their skating and decision-making.
In the consecutive shutouts, Sandrine Ponnath improved her save percentage to a dizzying .955, tops in the ACHA among netminders with at least five appearances. Ponnath is not an acrobat in the crease but rather the picture of composure and command. Her ability to navigate the crease from the butterfly through subtle pushes with either leg leaves opposing shooters with precious little to shoot at. She doesn’t venture far out of her crease, nor does she need to lunge across it to stop a puck. Instead, Ponnath is perpetually sound.
Before we wrap this week’s WoHo Wednesday, we should also plug our Tuesday profile of Sue McDowell. McDowell, a co-founder of the women’s club team and the former MAHA director for girls and women’s hockey, was extremely generous with her time in discussing a lifetime spent growing the game. If you haven’t had the chance to read it yet, we’d highly recommend finding the time.
Catching Up with Rob Rassey
New assistant coach Rob Rassey had a turbulent summer. In June, he was hired as head coach of the USHL’s Sioux Falls Stampede. In August, he had to set that gig aside before coaching a game when a call came from Brandon Naurato to join the staff at Michigan.
Upon arriving in Ann Arbor, Rassey “had a pretty good feel for the players” thanks to his work scouting them at previous stops, even if he had some work to do in terms of matching names and faces in the first few days of practice.
As Rassey explains it, “the hockey world is very small,” so he was familiar with the game of players like Mackie Samoskevich from his time scouting the USHL for the Red Wings. All that was left was actually meeting his new charges.
Like the rest of Naurato and his staff, Rassey is in something of a tenuous position given his head coach’s interim label. However, the Northeastern alum stresses that the specter of Naurato’s interim tag doesn’t factor into the staff’s day-to-day approach to their work: “We just go about our business the same way that we would if we were on ten-year contracts. We just do the best job we can. I think one thing that our staff shares is our mindset and development. It’s why we coach, why we do what we do, and it’s what we really enjoy doing.”
In similar alignment with the head man, Rassey emphasizes that player development and competing for championships are not mutually exclusive objectives. “Development is not necessarily skill drills. I think development is having patience with guys through the learning process of what it takes to win and getting guys ready for the next level.
“There’s a lot of details that go into the game that a lot of players learn when they get to the National Hockey League and how hard it is. We’re trying to do that here. We’re trying to distill those habits here, so when they there, that transition is easier for them. And that in turn is going to help win hockey games for Michigan.”
In making sure his (and the rest of the staff’s) message gets across, Rassey prioritizes clarity when working with this young team. “I think it’s the same way as any teacher is going to teach a class through a curriculum or a syllabus: making sure that it’s organized, making sure that the message is clear, making sure that you’re not trying to teach fifteen different things but rather try and teach a few things that are going to have the biggest impact.”
Before his chat with reporters concludes, the topic of one of Rassey’s previous stops arises. Between 2013 and 2019 Rassey served as an assistant under Ted Donato at Harvard, working with the likes of Adam Fox, Jimmy Vesey, and Alex Kerfoot. When asked if he’s looking forward to the Wolverines’ two game set with the Crimson Thanksgiving weekend, Rassey couldn’t help but grin.
“That’ll be a fun one. That’ll definitely be great to see those guys. Some of the guys that I recruited are still there, so yeah, looking forward to it.”
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