 Welcome to the Tracy Johnson show presented by Buffalo Wild Wings. I'm Sam Murray joined now with Stevenson women's ice hockey head coach, Tracy Johnson and coach. Tough opening weekend, uh, faced number two, Adrienne, followed by number three, Norwich at the Bulldog Bowl. Talk about the opening weekend. So I knew scheduling something like this early in the year was going to be a challenge for us, but I believe that you're only as good as your competition and it is a goal of ours to be a national caliber team. Now, keeping in mind that that is a process and I know and I understand that that takes time and we are not there yet, but we are never going to know how close we're getting or what we need to do unless we're playing against those types of teams and I think I would rather put ourselves out there and see, you know, how good are we? Can we hang with them? How long can we versus playing teams that are within our comfort zone? And, um, even though the score wasn't exactly how I think it could have been and wasn't a complete reflection of the effort that we put forth, um, you know, it's, it's something that I think we're going to build from and we're going to work hard to get to where we need to be so that we can compete with teams like that for a whole 60 minutes for a whole 120 minutes on the weekend. Yeah. In that opener versus Adrienne, uh, junior Katie Derosa had a career high 43 saves. I know you probably don't want to see that many shots, uh, thrown on her, but, uh, she had 43 saves, only the fifth time in program history that any goalkeeper has recorded at least 40. And that 43 actually ranks second in school histories. Talk about her performance in that, in that opening game. Yeah. She put everything out there and left everything on the ice. And that's all you can ask of, of your goal tenders. I think in the sport of hockey, in any sport, the ice hockey goalie is the most challenging position in all of sport. I truly believe that. And they have to be the most mentally tough out there. And, uh, I think that she stuck with it. It's not easy to have to let in that many goals and, and see that many shots. And I think it's a great thing on the goal tender side of things to learn that we need to be, um, you know, more conditioned to, to deal with that many shots, because the reality is when we play good teams like that, they're probably going to have to see, um, we want to minimize them as much as we can, but the reality is she's going to see a lot of shots. Yeah. So looking at this opening weekend, one of the emphasis going into the season really was special teams for you, um, not what you would have wanted, um, on both sides on the, uh, power play and penalty kill, but you have a whole extra week to, to work on those things. You guys don't play this weekend. What do you have to work on specifically to improve on, prove on both of those? Everything to put it quite bluntly. You know, we have to be better. And that, and that starts from, um, you know, the coaching side of things too. We, we've got to really hammer away at demanding that we're moving the puck quickly, that we're moving the puck tape to tape, that we're putting pucks on net when we need to, um, and I think it's just hammering away at those things that are going to make it successful and breaking it down to the basics, like let's practice one touch passing, let's practice moving into space, let's practice communicating and, um, having that urgency to get the puck to the net. I think sometimes you get this idea in your head that just cause we're a player up, it means we have a lot of time to, to do whatever we want. And that's not the case. So, um, you know, we have to be better and there's no question about that. And we have two weeks to, to work at it and hammer away at it and just demand more because when we have those opportunities on the power play, we have to capitalize. We had quite a few against Adrian. We had a few against Norwich, um, special teams are going to make or break us in against teams like that of that caliber. And if we can find a way to hone those in and be good and perform solidly with those, um, games are going to hopefully go our way more so than they won't. With that extra week of practice, your next game is going to be a conference game. What are other points of emphasis other than special teams that you're working on with your team? Discipline in the D zone. I think anytime that we don't have the puck, we have to be on the same page. So encouraging our team to really work on their hockey sense and reading the play and creating space and time. Um, when we have the pockets, it's creativity. It's reading off your teammates and skating into space and working harder without the puck than with the puck. And those are things that we just have to be good at day in and day out in order to be successful, especially getting into conference play. Well, coach, thank you for taking the time for being here. Uh, next week we'll, we'll take a look at, at your, uh, two conference games versus William Smith. Thank you so much. All right. For coach Tracy Johnson, I'm Sam Murray, and this has been the Tracy Johnson show.