The Geneseo Ice Knights split their two SUNYAC games last weekend, defeating SUNY Cortland 6-2 on Friday and falling to No. 1-ranked SUNY Oswego 4-0 on Saturday.
Sophomore Colin de Jersey started off the scoring for Geneseo with his first goal of the year halfway through the first period. Junior Danny Scagnelli made a tactical move to get around a defender and found de Jersey open to fire a shot into the back of the net. Later in the period, sophomore Kaz Iwamoto tallied his first goal of the year on assists from seniors Mike Forgione and Trevor Elliott.
After Cortland scored early in the second, freshman Zachary Vit scored to bring the lead back up to two. In the third, freshman Carson Schell became the third Ice Knight of the game to get his first goal of the season. Sophomore Ryan Bulach scored two more goals in the third, around a Cortland goal, to make the final score 6-2. Cortland was penalized nine times during the game, including four in the third period. Two of those came from hits to the head against junior Stefan Decosse and Iwamoto.
"It gets frustrating and unfortunately it shows on the ice," head coach Chris Schultz said. "They were taking some head pops at us."
Geneseo's offense was spread across all four lines. All but one of Geneseo's forwards tallied at least one point during the game.
"Our forwards were no match for their defensemen," Schultz said. "Guys are filling in for the guys who can't play and they're doing a good job with it."
Sophomore Adrian Rubeniuk made 27 saves, including stopping two breakaways to improve to 5-0-1 on the season.
On Saturday, Oswego scored the first goal of the game on what appeared to be an obvious offsides call early in the first period. Geneseo outplayed Oswego for most of the second period, outshooting the Lakers 17-12, but was unable to score.
"For the majority of the game we were the better team on the ice," Schultz said. "We spent a lot of time in their end. We just couldn't put pucks in the net and execute when we needed to."
Oswego scored on the power play late in the second, adding two more goals in the third to put the game away. Oswego was 2-4 on the power play for the game while Geneseo was 0-4, including a failure to score on a five minute major penalty.
"You gotta have a power play that works and you gotta be able to keep the puck out of the net when guys take penalties and we didn't get the job done tonight," Schultz said.
Geneseo is now 8-3-2 on the season and tied for second place in the SUNYAC at 5-2-1.