A hat trick from Kennedy Marchment and a 19-save shutout from Grace Harrison helped the St. Lawrence Saints to a 4-0 win over Harvard, sealing a weekend shutout of the Dartmouth-Harvard travel pair to kick off ECAC play after a 2-0 victory against Dartmouth Friday night. Marchment’s goals brought her to 75 career points and 17 on the season.
Her first goal came just 25 seconds into the contest, when she decided to keep the puck on her stick on the wall, cut toward net, and beat Brianna Laing with a wrist shot. Alex Moore netted her first goal of the season on a power play late in the first to give SLU a 2-0 lead after 20 minutes.
Marchment lit the lamp for the second time at the 16:12 mark of the middle frame. “I think [my favorite] might have been the second one, that was all just luck,” said Marchment with a laugh of her second-period goal, where she tipped a low shot in the slot past Laing. “[Webster] got it up to the point really nice, and Alex [Moore] just had a low shot, it just happened to hit my stick and go in.”
The tip-in gave the Saints a 3-0 lead, and Marchment stretched it to four with her hat trick with 2:33 left in the third. Brooke Webster left the puck for Marchment at the blue line, where she picked it up and fired a wrist shot from the high slot past Laing for her final goal of the night, sealing the win for the Saints, who improved to 8-0-1.
Grace Harrison recorded her second shutout in a row, and third of the season, with 19 saves against the Crimson, but Saints coach Chris Wells talked not just about the performance of his netminder, but of the job his team does as a unit defensively.
“The defense did a great job, Grace made some big stops when it was 1-0 and 2-0 to keep it that way,” said Wells about his entire team defense. “Everybody is just working hard. Everybody’s got their sticks on the ice, which the rules help with, because you have to have your stick on the ice, so we’ve been breaking up a lot of passes, and breaking the puck out really quickly.”
“I thought we played hard in the third period,” said Harvard coach Katey Stone. “We’ve got a long way to go. We’re young, and it’s early, and we’ve just got to keeping working hard.”
After the win, Marchment reflected on the hot start to the season that she and her linemates have had. All three are in the top 20 nationally in scoring, and Marchment is in solo second, just one point behind Minnesota’s Sarah Potomak, who has 18 in two more games than Marchment.
“I think my line is really clicking right now, and there making it easy for me to score right now, giving me open nets and stuff,” said Marchment.
The Saints head to Princeton and Quinnipiac next weekend, while Harvard takes a week off before heading to the same opponents.
