Reagan Rust knew the question was coming after the Boston University women’s hockey team’s 3-0 shellacking of Holy Cross on Friday evening.
The low-hanging fruit in postgame availability was, of course, what happened when the two teams last met — BU’s 4-2 loss in its first Hockey East tournament game of the Tara Watchorn era back on Feb. 28, which ended a disappointing first season under the new regime.
Rust, one of Watchorn’s assistants, was prepared to answer questions about that loss after BU’s dominant outing on Friday.
“Yep,” Rust said in a wincing tone. “Didn’t think you were going to bring that one up!”
BU looked like a program going nowhere then, a team that couldn’t even win a first-round home playoff game against one of the worst outfits in the conference. But 10 months later, here the Terriers are, beginning their biggest semester in years with a suffocating win over the Crusaders. They are the 13th-ranked team in the country. They are 12-5-1. They lead Hockey East, and not by accident. In her midweek video call Thursday, Watchorn said the approach for BU now was to learn how to take things “one game at a time,” because, well, tournaments happen one game at a time, and the Terriers suddenly look like a team very capable of winning them.
The Beanpot looms in just over a week, which BU hasn’t won in six years. The Hockey East Tournament hangs over everything, and the Terriers haven’t won it in a decade.
“Something we talked about — we had a lot of series in the first half, but we have a lot of one-game split series in the back half, which kind of plays into the same feeling of a Beanpot,” Watchorn said.
The first of those one-game split series was Holy Cross and, gee, did BU sure look like a team built to win do-or-die tournament games.
Against a sneaky-good team, the Terriers (10-2-1 Hockey East) outshot the Crusaders, 30-15. They dominated the special teams, scoring two goals on the power play and killing all seven penalties, even coming close to scoring themselves on two of those kills. Holy Cross (7-10-1, 3-8-1 HE), which spent 17 minutes on the skater advantage, recorded 29 total shots. And in the few moments the Crusaders worked a decent chance, netminder Callie Shanahan (.924 save percentage) bailed BU out.
More importantly, though, the Terriers prepared the way they needed to, perfectly handling the 29-day hiatus between Holy Cross and BU’s fall-semester finale at Maine. Watchorn was “wow’d” by the shape in which her team returned — she said the team took care of their bodies and used the resources available to them during a 23-day break from organized team activity, which ended Sunday. Watchorn said BU “hit the ground running,” which snuffed any worry BU would come out flat on Friday.
“They knew they were gonna have a little bit of testing whenever they got back, so I guess that helps push them,” Rust quipped.
Still, BU did what it needed to do over the break, even when it wasn’t together as a team, and reaped the benefits. Knowing all of those numbers above, Rust said “the body-contact, for sure” when asked what impressed her most about BU’s performance.
“Obviously a few penalties out of it, but I’d rather there be more contact than no contact at all,” she added. “The girls really embrace that, and it’s one thing we worked on and emphasized in practice, just getting them back into the flow of things.”
Rust was then asked if the physicality will be extra important in tournament games — the first round of the Beanpot is next Tuesday — and pushed back, saying “it’s important every single game, because if you don’t have contact, you don’t have anything.” But BU will certainly stand to benefit from its physicality in both the Beanpot and the Hockey East tournament, when the margins become razor-thin and things like board-battles begin to loom large.
“I’ve been telling them, my whole career as a player and a coach, I don’t think I’ve seen a team sustain the compete that this group has this long into a season,” Watchorn said.
Of course, skill and technicality will matter in those games, too, and the Terriers looked good in that department on Friday, as well. BU grabbed the game by the throat midway through the second period on a gorgeous tic-tac-toe play. Sophomore Alex Law won the face-off (BU was 33-20 on draws, another little thing that will certainly help in the biggest games) and the puck found graduate captain Tamara Giaquinto, who rifled a one-time pass into junior Luisa Welcke in the slot.
Welcke sent a perfect feed to the doorstep, and junior Riley Walsh, climbing from behind the goal, tapped it behind HC goalie Abby Hornung (24 saves).
Walsh was in the right place at the right time, much like she was against Maine on Dec. 6, when she notched the game-winning goal with a deflection from the slot. The Union transfer has now potted six times this year and continues to score the type of resourceful goals that decide close, hard-fought games.
“She had that skill set before she even came to us,” Rust said. “She’s always been really good in front of the net, she’s good at reading where it’s going to come off the rebound, she’s just good at battling in front.”
Christina Vote’s opening goal on the power play was also a great sign — the senior forward, who leads the team in assists (12), hadn’t scored coming in and appeared reluctant to shoot, despite finding herself in dangerous positions constantly. But Vote wasted no time early in the second Friday, tattooing a one-timer from the circle that snuck through Hornung’s five hole.
Rust was asked if the staff wanted Vote to simply shoot the sucker more often.
“We were cheering on the bench,” she said. “Yes, we have told her and she has been working on it. It’s funny, because she has the pass-first mentality, and she’s really good at it, but she does have a really good shot.”
With Vote’s goal, BU now has only one everyday forward yet to score this year (it’s Law, whose physical traits are endlessly valuable). That depth has been critical — October Hockey East Player of the Month Lola Reid carried BU early but still hasn’t scored since, yet the Terriers haven’t skipped a beat.
That’s the thing about BU this season. It just finds a way to win, which, ultimately, is what this second semester — the biggest for the program since before the pandemic — will come down to. The foundation was set in the fall. Now it’s about taking care of business, about repetition and consistency, about, you know, winning one game at a time.
Last time they faced Holy Cross, the Terriers couldn’t do any of that. But right now, it sure looks like they can.
“Definitely extra motivation,” Rust said of playing the Crusaders for the first time. “It’s been a big point of emphasis that we’re not going to be pushed around by any team we play. And so I think for us, it was more so showing them that the first semester wasn’t a fluke, and we’re going to keep it rolling.”
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