PITTSBURGH– After a hard-fought first game of the season against the Michigan Tech Huskies (2-0) that ended in a 2-1 overtime loss, the Robert Morris men’s hockey team (0-2) looked for revenge coming into Sunday afternoon’s game. Unfortunately, the Colonials did not get said revenge as they lost the game 7-0. Reid Cooper got the start for the Colonials despite a strong performance from last night’s goaltender, Justin Kapelmaster.

The first period of this game was where the bulk of the scoring came. Trenton Bliss started the offense for the Huskies just four minutes into the game with a goal. This play was beautifully set up by Greyson Reitmeier and Brian Halonen, Reid Cooper couldn’t stop the shot down low. After an unsuccessful RMU power-play, Michigan Tech got a power-play of their own and capitalized with Alec Broetzman scoring.

Robert Morris then had another opportunity to score on a power-play but failed to do so, and just like last time, Michigan Tech got a power-play of their own and scored right after. Alec Broetzman again scored on the power-play for the Huskies and just over two minutes later Broetzman finished off the hat-trick making it 4-0. But before the period could end the Huskies were not done as Parker Saretsky put another puck past Reid Cooper, ending his night as he was pulled as Dyllan Lubbesmeyer came in.

“We didn’t give ourselves a good fighting chance after the first ten minutes or so in the game. When you’re down 5-0, you just hope to win periods at that point,” stated head coach Derek Schooley regarding the first period.

Robert Morris played a much stronger game in the second and third periods but had too big of a hill to climb after a 5-0 deficit after only twenty minutes. Both Brian Halonen and Eric Gotz were able to add insult to injury with two more goals for the Huskies.

Not only did the Colonials have such a rough time defending, they only scored one goal the entire weekend, which came from Justin Addamo. Granted, the Colonials did have offensive chances with 25 shots on goal, with Nick Prkusic having six, but Matt Jurusik was able to post the shutout. RMU did not score a power-play goal the entire weekend despite having eight chances to do so.

“We could play the best defensive game possible but we got zero goals and only scored one on the weekend, so we gotta work on finding some offense. We had a lot of shots and a lot of chances and we just did not convert on them so hats off to their goalie. The shots were 27 to 25, it doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out that our save percentage needs to be better,” added Schooley.

With this being such a young team with 17 underclassmen, overall this weekend looks to be a learning experience for RMU as they move forward against Bentley (0-0) next weekend at home on Friday.