With All-American goaltender Noora Räty out of the lineup due to being “nicked up,” according to Minnesota coach Brad Frost, freshman Shyler Sletta made her first career start and pitched a 20-save shutout in a 3-0 win over Minnesota State Thursday night.<\/p>\n
Showing her humble side after the game, Sletta said she wasn’t too concerned with the shutout.<\/p>\n
“I wasn’t really thinking about it,” Sletta said. “I was thinking, ‘Let’s win, let’s win, let’s win.’ I was more worried about what everybody else was doing.”<\/p>\n
At the other end of the ice, Minnesota (6-1-0, 4-1-0 WCHA) did enough to ensure the win.<\/p>\n
After stopping everything that the Gophers threw at her for most of the first period, a long Minnesota dump-in managed to elude Mavericks’ goalie Alli Altmann for a 1-0 lead at 16:42.<\/p>\n
“It’s funny the way sometimes goals go in,” MSU coach Eric Means said. “Yeah, it was a fluky goal, but they had controlled that first period. Alli had made a lot of good saves and it could easily have been 3-0 or 4-0 instead of 1-0.”<\/p>\n
Altmann stopped 22 of 23 shots in the first period for the Mavericks (4-3-0, 0-1-0 WCHA).<\/p>\n
Sara Davis got credit for her first of the season as she scored on a rebound two minutes into the middle frame to up the lead to 2-0.<\/p>\n
“Seventh game of the season – I don’t care how they go in at this point,” said Davis. “I just want them to go in.”<\/p>\n
Frost was happy to see his second-line center end her personal drought.<\/p>\n
“That first one tonight was obviously pretty unorthodox, but you could just see the weight lift off of her shoulders a little bit,” Frost said. “We need her to score. Obviously, she likes to pass first, but we’re going to need her to score to be successful throughout the year.”<\/p>\n
Megan Bozek got the final goal on a slap shot in the final minute of the second period to take much of the remaining drama out of the game.<\/p>\n
“That was huge,” Frost said. “Anytime you’re within two goals, it’s a dangerous lead to have. I’d rather have it than up one, but certainly the dagger was that third goal with 20 seconds left.”<\/p>\n
As the clock wound down, the biggest mystery was whether or not Sletta’s slate would stay clean.<\/p>\n
“I’m not nervous in net, so I wasn’t going to get too fidgety or anything,” Sletta said.<\/p>\n
Altmann finished with 49 saves on the night, a new career-high. She made 48 stops against Wisconsin in February 2010.<\/p>\n
“We just didn’t put enough shifts back to back to back to start to take any momentum at all in that game,” Means said. “We played a little bit better in the third period, but it wasn’t enough. We need to carry that over to tomorrow night.”<\/p>\n
The teams conclude their series on Friday night at 6:07 p.m. at Ridder Arena.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With All-American goaltender Noora Räty out of the lineup due to being “nicked up,” according to Minnesota coach Brad Frost, freshman Shyler Sletta made her first career start and pitched a 20-save shutout in a 3-0 win over Minnesota State Thursday night. Showing her humble side after the game, Sletta said she wasn’t too concerned […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":22374,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13464"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/43"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13464"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13465,"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13464\/revisions\/13465"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13464"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp-admin.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=13464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}