Krueger scores twice late in 3-1 victory

MEDFORD GIRLS HOCKEY

FLYING PAST THE EAGLES

As the shots on goal and shots that didn’t quite hit the net added up Tuesday, the Medford girls hockey team held on to one thought in its second matchup of the season with Northland Pines.

Just keep shooting. Exactly like the first meeting, a 3-2 win back on Dec. 16, that mentality paid off with the Raiders eventually overturning a 1-0 deficit by scoring the next three goals in a 3-1 win. On Senior Night, senior co-captain Skylier Krueger got the last two, breaking the 1-1 tie early in the third period when she and sophomore co-captain Victoria Konieczny perfectly executed a breakaway chance. Krueger banged home the clincher while the Raiders were on a power play with 4:27 left, clinching the program’s first-ever regular-season sweep of the Eagles.

“That was very cool,” Krueger said of finding the net twice on Senior Night. “I was very excited to win tonight. It means a lot because this is the first time we’ve ever really won against them.”

The Raiders outshot the Eagles 3429, including a 24-16 advantage over the last two periods, but Medford head coach Scott Brandner felt his team had several great opportunities in all three periods. The team has been working on a new 2-3 pressure forecheck, and in the last couple of weeks, Brandner said the team is finding that when executed properly, it works.

“We make some mistakes yet and we give up some breakaways, which we’re working on,” Brandner said. “But when the pressure forecheck is working, it works well. We get so many turnovers. Like I told the girls after the first period, ‘we’re sitting here with only 10 shots, but you guys missed the net eight times.’ We had some good shots and totally missed the net.”

“It is frustrating but then you also know that, hey, you can put another shot on net,” said Konieczny, who scored Medford’s first goal of the night. “You know eventually it’s going to go in, no matter how many times you shoot, it’s going to go in.”

That was basically how her goal happened. At the 4:33 mark of the second period, she fired a shot from a tough angle near the boards to the left of Eagle goalie Jenna Uhrine, who got her stick on the puck, but it deflected nearly straight up and tucked itself just under the crossbar.

“It was more of I just hope it hits the net and hope someone’s there,” Konieczny said. “I was surprised. I think I was the last person to see that it went in.”

Delaney Hraby and Zayleah Leonhardt were credited with assists on the tying goal. The Raiders had a handful of good chances and shots on net over the next eight minutes. Then Medford goalie Ilsa Brunner stopped a breakaway chance by Eagle Mallory Schmidt and then covered up the rebound just before anyone could tap it in with 3:04 left in the period. With 1:15 left, Hraby got a shot that nearly snuck inside the post on the short side. With 30 seconds left, Leonhardt put a shot on goal and then couldn’t quite stuff in the rebound keeping the game tied.

The play that produced the go-ahead goal started with a face-off won by Krueger deep in the defensive zone. Carly Koski flipped the puck to Konieczny near the blue line and she took off, sprinting past two Eagles. As she bore down on Uhrine’s left side, she passed the puck to Krueger, who just had to get a stick on it to get it into the net.

“In practice we work on a three-person weave where you use your teammates to score,” Konieczny said. “I was already past the goalie, so I knew there was no shot where I was going to score. I knew Skylier was behind me because that’s what we worked on, so I passed it back to her and was just hoping for the best and she was there.”

“Basically I won (the face-off) backwards and then Tori got to go up, so she and I both took off. She passed it across and as she passed it I was falling over, so I hit and I saw it go in the net and I just kept falling.”

“Tori had the play of the year so far. I told her that,” Brandner said. “That was everything we work on in our drills. She drew that goalie over and she didn’t have a chance.”

With Medford on the power play due to a roughing call on the Eagles, the clincher came off a shot from the point by Leonhardt that got pushed to the corner and recovered by Hraby. She centered the puck in front of the net, where Krueger was unchecked and punched it in.

“A lot of it was right place at the right time,” she said.

“We’ve been moving the puck better on our power play lately,” Brandner said. “We moved it, got it to where we needed it to go and Skylier was right where she should be. We had just said at the beginning of that period, coach Tash (Schmidtfranz) was like, ‘we’re close to the net. Let’s just back ourselves out a little bit’ and that puck comes right in the middle and sure enough.”

Brunner collected 16 saves in the final two periods. Leonhardt actually got the start in net and stopped 12 of 13 shots in the first period. Ava Carrillo got the lone goal, rebounding a shot by Schmidt 12:57 in.

Now 3-8 on the year, Medford has two games this weekend in Beaver Dam, one against the host team and one against the Baraboo-based Badger Lightning. These are two games the Raiders believe they can win.

“We need to put more pucks in the net,” Brandner said. “That’s been a little of an achilles heel. We have to fix that. But if we can figure out how to put pucks in the net with that kind of pressure, this weekend is going to look very good for us. This is a good start. We’re going to go down there and give it everything we got.”

“I feel like we’re working really well together this year,” Konieczny said. “It may not show up in the stats or the scoreboard, but compared to the beginning of the year, we’ve improved so much.”

Glacier 6, Raiders 1

On Friday, the Raiders scored on their first shot on goal of the night to tie the game at 1-1, but the Brookfield Glacier kept them out of the net the rest of the way and skated to a 6-1 win during Youth Night at the Simek Center.

Macy Blooming scored the Glacier’s last three goals to record a hat trick and Ava Baugnet collected 10 of her 17 saves in the third period as the Glacier beat Medford for the third straight year. After a 4-1 win over the Northern Edge Saturday to complete their weekend road trip, the Glacier improved to 9-8 for the season.

Brandner felt there were two key points in the game. First, the Raiders weren’t at their sharpest in the first period and allowed the team coming off a long bus ride to look like the quicker, fresher team. Secondly, just as he felt Medford was gaining some second-period momentum, two straight penalties, including a debatable five-minute boarding major, took some steam from the Raiders’ effort to get back in it.

“I love our hustle,” Brandner said afterwards. “We’ve got hustle. We missed the open net two or three times. Miss the net two or three times when it was 4-1, and it hurts.”

The Glacier, a co-op based out of Brookfield Central that covers a dozen suburban Milwaukee schools, created some heavy traffic in front of the net and snuck the puck past Brunner at 3:09 of the first period with Cori Rudella getting the goal off a Payton Dykstra assist.

The Raiders got even at 7:29. They advanced the puck into the offensive zone and Emily Kiselicka carried it right to left in front of the net before trying to flip it on net. It got deflected into the air but bounced to Jaylin Machon at the edge of the crease and she deflected it past Baugnet.

Unfortunately, the tie lasted just 72 seconds. At 8:41, the Glacier was able to get on a breakout and Emma Lawrence beat Brunner on her stick side. Assists were credited to Ella Vranak and Ellie Peterson. At 10:48, the Glacier won a faceoff in Medford’s offensive zone with the puck finding the stick of Kali Santos, who carried it to the other end of the rink and went top shelf to make it 3-1.

After getting outshot 15-4 in the period, Medford settled down in the second. The Glacier did get Blooming’s first goal at 8:30 as she put in her own rebound. Then the penalties hit at 10:34 and 11:13 to put Medford in a prolonged penalty kill, including 50 seconds of five-on-three. The Raiders, though, survived it and actually had two good shots on one shift at getting a short-hander.

“They did great,” Brandner said of that penalty kill. “It just kept us from doing what we wanted to do. That period we wanted to come out and do exactly what we did in the third period. We said if we put major pressure on them in the second period, maybe get a goal, get two goals and then come out in that third period and go at them as hard as we can, who knows.

“That’s what their coach (Kevin Armbruster) said. “He said, ‘I love that your girls fly all over and your pressure is unreal.’ It’s just that we have to do stuff off of pressure. We put his new 2-3 pressure forecheck in because it turns the puck over. But when we turn it over, we’ve got to get back in there and put it in the net. We’re getting better at it every week.”

While Medford’s offensive pressure certainly picked up in the third period, more than doubling the eight shots the Raiders had put on goal through two periods, Blooming got the period’s only scores, winning a one-on-one breakaway chance at 3:55 and scoring off an oddskater rush at 10:43.

Brunner finished with 32 saves for the Raiders.

Medford senior Eryka Seidl tries to get her stick on the puck and make something happen in the offensive zone during Tuesday’s first period while it’s caught between the legs of Eagle Sarah Nordine.MATT FREY/THE STAR NEWS

Brookfield’s Kali Santos gets to the crease with the puck, but Medford’s Ilsa Brunner is ready for her and makes this second-period save during Friday’s 6-1 loss to the Glacier co-op.MATT FREY/THE STAR NEWS