The Varsity Blues women’s hockey team dropped their second game in a row as the Guelph Gryphons scored an overtime winner to claim a 3–2 victory Saturday at the Varsity Arena.
Jacalyn Sollis’ game-winning goal saw the Blues record fall to 2–2–1 for the season. Both losses came this week, Toronto falling to the Brock Badgers the night before their defeat by Guelph.
Both Blues’ goals came unassisted; the first by the rookie defenseman, April Looije, and the second by veteran Kelly O’Hanlon.
The first period was a battle of the goaltenders. Both teams had opportunities, but the goalies stood their ground. Blues goaltender Nicole Kesteris, made 12 saves in the first, and 34 overall, to keep her team in the game.
“[The goalie’s play] is extremely important,” said Looije, “To know that I have [Kesteris] there to back me up [at] times when we make little tiny errors, it helps us get back into the game and gives us motivation to be there.”
Despite Kesteris’ heroics, the Gryphons scored the lone goal of the period with only 22 seconds left on the clock.
“When we went into the dressing room [the coaches] said ‘we haven’t scored in four periods and we need to keep shooting the puck, keep shooting the puck to the net.’ We were being outshot, so we needed to get shots to the net and on the net,” Sunohara said.
In the second period the Blues got into some penalty trouble. This allowed the Gryphons to score their second of the game, a power play goal from Kimberley Wong.
“We were playing with intensity; I told them to keep playing,” Sunohara said. “We felt like we were getting interfered with a lot, [so] we just said, ‘keep fighting though, keep playing the body, don’t retaliate, don’t talk back to the referee’s, and keep going.’”
With five minutes to go in the period, rookie defenseman Looije scored her first-ever goal for the Blues. The goal put Toronto back in the game with a period left to play.
“Our coach was telling us ‘just get some pucks to the net.’ They started to out-shoot us. When I went out that shift [Sunohara] was just like ‘get pucks to the net.’ I saw the opportunity to shoot, so I [did],” Looiji said.
The Blues were down 2–1 going into the third period, but O’Hanlon scored a beautiful goal on a breakaway to tie the game up five minutes in.
“It was a huge goal,” coach Vicky Sunohara explained. “Basically end-to-end, it was a great individual effort by [O’Hanlon] and I think that it definitely boosted the team up”
The tying goal followed one by the Gryphons that was called off by the referee. That goal would have made the game 3–1, but having it chalked off allowed the Blues to come back.
“We didn’t even think there was a question [on the no-call goal], the referee did not signal a goal, so I would have been shocked if they called it a goal,” Sunohara said.
Though the game went into overtime, the Gryphons did not take long to score the winner, netting 37 seconds into the five-minute overtime period.
The Blues have a week off before they take on the University of Western Ontario Saturday at the Varsity Arena
