Muskies sink Eagles, top Spring Lake Park

The Muskie scoring avalanche roared over the weekend here as the boys’ hockey team trounced the Dryden Eagles by a sizable 8-2 margin.
Fort High (4-0) already is on a roll this season, winning every game by at least five goals, including their first of the campaign against Dryden (1-1).
“It’s still early in the season. We’ve got a lot of work to do,” said forward Joe Basaraba. “They’re gonna be a challenge in the next couple of months . . . they’ll be a team we gotta bring our game to, just like any other team.”
Assistant coach Ken Christiansen took over the helm for the night with head coach Shane Bliss out of town. And while he was happy with the win, he had problems with the team’s execution.
“I thought we played very well from their blueline in. I thought we struggled from their blueline out,” Christiansen said. “We get our defensive play straightened out, we’ll be okay.”
Christiansen credited the work of goalie David Moen, saying he played “very, very well” in the face of the team’s worst defensive night of the season.
Basaraba showed the kind of play that earned him rookie-of-the-year honours last season, scoring a pair of big goals and assists.
Zach McCool and Matt Hebert each netted a pair of goals, with Kevin Bobcyznski and Dustin Brown rounding out the scoring.
The team’s secondary scoring was the story on a night when the first line of George Halverson, Taylor Jorgenson, and captain Ryan Witherspoon was held pointless.
Witherspoon said despite his displeasure with his own lack of production, he was happy to see that kind of balance on the scoresheet.
“It’s really good ’cause right now our line’s been kind of struggling, but the other lines have been hauling away,” he noted. “It’ll raise our confidence a little bit knowing we can score on a couple lines.”
Christiansen agreed.
“I thought Matt Beck’s line worked hard tonight, I thought [Matt] DePiero’s line worked hard,” he said. “In their zone, they were great.”
Basaraba, one of the forces driving the team’s offensive production, admitted there were plenty of mistakes on the ice despite the lopsided score.
“Overall I thought we didn’t play too bad but [for] a couple letdowns here and there,” he said. “Bad bounces, little letdowns, missed communications, stuff like that.
“Little things like that just come back to haunt us.”
Still, the Muskies’ all-out offence carried through, and it speaks volumes about this squad that 8-2 is their least impressive score of the season.
But up against the Eagles and at home on a Friday night for the first time on the season, the boys sent a clear message—something Christiansen was happy to see.
“They way I see it is Dryden’s gonna be our main competition this year,” he said. “This’ll be going all year long.”
The Muskie boys followed their Friday night NorWOSSA win with a much closer 5-4 victory Saturday afternoon over a visiting squad from Spring Lake Park, Mn.
Bliss, back behind the bench on Saturday, said the game could have been another blowout for the Muskies. “We had a 4-1 lead going into the third and pretty much squandered it,” he remarked.
Scoring came from all corners of the team again, with Kevin Bobcyznski, Matt Beck, Jorgenson, Halverson, and Basaraba each contributing a goal to the cause.
Bliss said the tight score was a welcome change of pace from the regular whitewashings the Muskies hand out in league play. “We need to play teams like that. They’re a good hockey team,” he said of Spring Lake Park.
The Muskies head to Minnesota this coming weekend for games in Red Lake Falls on Friday and then Hallock on Saturday.