Jack Allard scored first for the Bobcats (5-1, 2-1 NESCAC), then assisted on Charlie Fay’s goal just over a minute later to make it 2-0 Bates 3:05 into the game. The Bantams (1-4, 1-2) evened the game with goals by Stefan Pappas and Ben Knaus in the latter half of the first quarter.
Late in the opening period, Bates coach Peter Lasagna made the adjustment to get his defenders to slide faster.
The Bobcats offense needed no adjustment, just a re-boost, which came from Kyle Weber with less than three minutes to go in the first quarter. Bates didn’t relinquish its 3-2 lead after Weber’s rip.
Trinity goalie Henry Coote kept it a one-goal game with a diving, goal-line save against Fay with 10 seconds left in the first. Fay then got revenge early in the second with an under-hand shot past Coote.
The teams traded a pair of goals each the rest of the half, giving the Bobcats a 6-4 lead going into the break. Allard finished off the back-and-forth, scoring from the right side with 20 seconds left not long after the Bantams killed off a penalty.
That penalty denied a Trinity goal with just over a minute left. Jack Sharrio’s illegal hit in the offensive zone preceeded a shot that Bates goalie Joe Faria couldn’t stop.
Faria was hurt on the play after landing awkwardly on his ankle. Mitchell Drake played the remainder of the first half.
“Definitely at first I was worried, but I went off with the trainer, stretched it out,” Faria said. “It definitely hurt for the rest of the game, but I was able to adjust pretty well.”
Lasagna said he was worried when he saw his senior goalie go down, but Faria was able to return and come up big in the second half.
Faria and the Bates defense held Trinity to just one goal in the third quarter — the third of four goals from Knaus. Faria made a goal-line save of his own to stop a Bantam chance with five seconds left in the period.
“I thought they were good in the middle,” Lasagna said of his defense in the second and third quarters. “I thought that we could have been better early, and could have been better late. But I think in the middle we started to slide a little bit more, be a little bit more active. They did a really nice job turning the ball back over, and then did a good job getting the ball up and out of our own end.”
The Bobcats scored three times in the third — twice from a known goal-scorer (Allard) and another from a non-traditional source.
Ken O’Friel, a defenseman with a long stick, opened the second-half scoring with a counter-attack goal just over five minutes in.
“That in itself is a huge momentum swing alone,” Faria said of O’Friel’s goal. “A guy who obviously is not meant to be a goal-scorer goes and scores a goal, an unexpected goal in transition, that fires the team up.”
Bates stretched its lead to 12-5 by the midway point of the fourth quarter, only for the Bantams to make it interesting with a trio of goals in a 102-second span.
“I would have liked to have finished it a little bit better once we got up (12-5),” Lasagna said. “But everybody’s good, and they’re always going to fight, and that’s a good lesson for us.”
Weber put the bow on the victory with a two-man-up goal in the final minute. That gave him a hat trick to match Allard’s six-point game (four goals, two assists).
Faria made 14 saves on 22 shots faced, while Coote stopped 17 of Bates’ 30 shots on goal.
“I thought I played pretty well,” Faria said. “Definitely defense played their best performance thus far this year.”
wkramlich@sunjournal.com
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