Hockey teams able to cope with the occasional minutes when they’re playing shorthanded are known as good penalty killers.
When shorthanded gets measured in weeks and months, however, coping becomes a little more tricky.
Attrition has been a greater concern than high sticking or slashing at Shawano Community High School, where the hockey team endured the 2014-15 season with a threadbare roster.
“We have the talent on our team; we just don’t have the numbers,” said coach Bryon Lammers, who became the Hawks’ de facto head coach in December after the passing of coach Tommie Carlin-Schauer.
Shawano, which co-ops with Bonduel, went 2-14-1 as a varsity-reserve club in the recently completed season. A varsity-reserve club is not eligible for the postseason state tournament.
“We’ve got 13 skaters,” Lammers said. “That’s about the bare minimum to get by.”
Anyone who has ever laced up a pair of hockey skates knows the exhaustive, frenetic nature of a single, one-minute shift on the ice. Those shifts add up over the course of a game, and a season. A player can have the heart of a lion, but when the energy store is depleted, performance suffers.
As Lammers noted, the issue with the players is strictly one of quantity, not quality.
Junior captain and center Blake Stoss played productive shifts with wings Brendan Cummings, a senior, and sophomore Aaron Lammers. Sophomore defenseman Chris Hass was an assistant captain, and sophomore goalie Brendan Chapman won the team’s most valuable player award. Freshman defenseman Bryce Gagnow was having a good year until a broken hand suffered in January brought a premature end to his season.
“A couple of our better games were actually losses,” Lammers said. “We played Rhinelander, which has a good team and a lot of players. It figured that we were going to get blown out, but we lost that game only 3-1.”
Another well-played game that ended in defeat was the 7-3 loss to Merrill’s varsity. Three of Merrill’s goals came on the same major-penalty power play.
Quality opponents and a thin bench are legitimate challenges for a high school hockey program. Another is the depth to which one must reach into his own pocket in order to play.
“Instead of the $30 athletic fee that you pay to play in other sports, it costs about $500 per skater for the season,” Lammers said. “We try to keep the cost down as much as possible for the kids. We have a fundraiser in the spring, and we have a couple of others we do in the fall.”
Fundraisers would not be as essential to the program’s survival if the overall numbers improved. The program was stronger when Pulaski was part of the co-op, but it has since joined a co-op involving Ashwaubenon, Seymour and Wrightstown.
“We have a lot of Pulaski kids in our (youth) league,” said Lammers, who has indicated his day job could preclude his continuing as head coach. “Projecting it two years from now, we’ll have about 16 players from the Shawano/Bonduel area, and there would be another 16 to 18 from Pulaski. If the Pulaski kids would come back to our co-op, we’d have enough for a varsity team and a varsity-reserve team.”
There are numbers, and talent, in the younger levels of the Shawano Hockey League, too. Two years ago, the bantam team (ages 13-14) took eighth place in their division of the state tournament. The year before that, a Shawano team of sophomores and juniors finished fifth at state in their division. The squirt team (ages 9-10) took second place recently in its division of the state tournament.
“We have about 65 players in the mites and mini-mites divisions,” Lammers said. “Those are kids ages 4 through 8. If we can keep that kind of number as they come through the ranks, then our future looks good. We’ll do really well.”
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