Rensselaer coach Bryan Vines and graduate student Lauren Severson say their team is focused on the present and enjoying the fact that their team is finally able to return to the ice after 19 months passed between their final game in February 2020 and when they dropped the puck in September this year.
But while the team isn’t spending much time thinking about their winless 19-20 season, it’s hard not to compare their much stronger start this time around to what happened the last time the played a season. The RPI women’s hockey program went 951 days (two years and seven months) between wins.
And then they broke their losing streak in convincing fashion, rattling off four wins in a row, something the program hadn’t done since December of 2012.
The wins are great, especially for team morale, but Vines isn’t trying to read too much into anything at this point in the season.
“It’s always great to get a couple of big wins against two really good teams in your own rink. But that really hasn’t been our focus. It’s so early in the season. We’ve been really focused on our process…“We always try to remain optimistic, but you try to live in the present in terms of what’s going on right now. We’ve got a lot of work to do. This is just the beginning of the season,” he said.
“We’re focused on the here and now and today and we’re not looking back two years ago. We’re not looking a day back. We’re looking at what’s in front of us right now and trying to do that to the best of our ability. And the team’s really bought into that. I think if we continue on that path, things are going to happen for us.”
Severson said that more than two years off the ice, not playing the game they love, has helped the 13 players on this team who were a part of the 2019-2020 squad put that season well in the rearview. The pandemic has made time move in weird ways and that season feels like a very long time ago. A lot has happened since then that has helped put their love of playing the game at the forefront and give everything else a lot more perspective.
“We all kind of had a tough ride with Covid and it taught us to be grateful and just take every opportunity as it comes. We don’t really pay attention to the team that we were before, not even yesterday, not before Covid. We’re a new team every day, we’re getting better,” she said.
“The whole idea of our team right now is to come to the rink every day grateful because we missed our season last year. It becomes that much more exciting. We’re really tough because of everything that happened last year and the year before.”
Severson is the only graduate student on the roster this season and returning to play one more year was important to her because she didn’t want the 2019-20 season to be the lasting memory she had of playing hockey at this level.
“I didn’t want to leave the team like that. It’s not how I wanted to look back at it, maybe decades from now, so I wanted to make sure that when I left the program it was as best as I could have made it before I left,” she said.
The Engineers have found success early on in part thanks to the goaltending of Amanda Rampado. She has made more saves (308) than any goaltender in the country at this point in the season and is carrying a 1.91 goals against average.
RPI is also scoring more. Their experienced older core of players is strong with the puck, able to hold possession more and has already scored more goals this season than they did in all of 2019-20. The addition of Marah Wagner, from Robert Morris, has been a boon as she’s the team’s leading scorer and Vines said she’s become a leader in the locker room in her short time with the program.
But Vines said the team and the program are improving not because of the talents of individual players, but because of the way the team plays together.
“It’s about playing for your teammate, not with your teammate in our program. The gratitude, the humility, the willingness to put the work in and the commitment (are important),” he said. “(It’s) the energy that the team plays with and the togetherness and the connection that they play with on the ice. I think you see the love for each other and for the game.…We’ve got a really tight knit group that goes to battle together. I can see that in how they huddle around the net before the game or at the bench before each period.”
The Engineers have 15 upperclassmen on the roster. That strong group of older players has been crucial in guiding the team through the pandemic and back onto the ice this year, starting with captains practices, said Vines. The older players are modeling leadership, accountability and how to be resilient through adversity and that has made RPI ready to hit the ice as a better team each week this season.
The schedule doesn’t get any easier for RPI, but the team has already created a solid foundation on which to build the rest of the season. They have proven they are a team no opponent can take lightly and they’ve started a new chapter for Rensselaer women’s hockey.
