The Clemson club ice hockey team defeated the Fredonia State Blue Devils 7-2 this past weekend at the AAU Hockey National Tournament in Westchester, Pennsylvania.
This win marked the second consecutive upset No. 31 Clemson successfully pulled off, the first of which was over No. 15 Penn State Harrisburg. Clemson finished with a 2-1-0 Nationals record and a 9-12-0 regular season record.
Clemson left-winger Cade Heinold struck first for the Tigers five minutes into the early period, assisted by right-winger Herbert Kopf and defenseman Thomas Samuelsen.
The remainder of the first period did not go as well for Clemson, as Fredonia State answered with a vengeance before the end of the period and headed into the second with a 2-1 lead.
However, the Blue Devils would not record another point for the rest of the game.
Early in the second, Samuelsen tied the score up at 2-2, assisted by left-winger Jack Owen-Turner and defenseman Benjamin Brucker. Minutes later, Samuelsen recorded his second of the night, assisted by Heinold, to return the lead to the Tigers.
Less than one minute after Samuelsen’s go-ahead goal, centerman Graydon Schweizer netted a shorthanded goal for the Tigers with an assist from Sully Kopf. Clemson then went on to dominate the game with a three-point lead.
Frustrated by his team’s sudden decline, Fredonia State forward Ryan Zablonski tackled Samuelsen and broke his stick, resulting in an ejection from the game and a five-minute power play for Clemson. While on this man advantage, Heinold netted his second of the game, assisted by Samuelsen and Herbert Kopf, to close out the second period with four unanswered goals.
Samuelsen proved to be unphased by Zablonski’s attempt to frustrate him, as he started the third period with his third goal of the game, assisted by Herbert Kopf and defenseman Christian Romeo. This performance marked Samuelsen’s first hat trick of the season.
With under 10 minutes to go, centerman Nicholas Chesare netted Clemson’s second shorthanded goal of the night, bringing the final score to 7-2. Heinold assisted this goal as well, bringing his point total of the day to four.
With 1:34 left before the final buzzer, Fredonia defenseman Dominik Zimmer became the second ejected Blue Devil after receiving a game misconduct for contact to the head on Clemson left-winger Liam Clark.
“It was huge. Obviously, we wanted to keep our hopes alive, and we wanted to go out with a win even if this is the end,” Clark told College Hockey Federation following the win. “We’re looking forward to watching the (Penn State) and Niagara game and hoping for a good result in that, and hopefully, we’ll be able to keep playing.”
Unfortunately for Clemson, Niagara defeated Penn State later that day by a score of 6-2 and knocked the Tigers out of contention for the national championship trophy. Despite this result, Clemson is proud of its performance this season, especially at Nationals.
“It’s our first time at Nationals, so we wanted to be able to show that the South can play hockey,” Chesare said. “A bunch of the teams in the south, like (South Carolina) and Georgia, are very good. We played against them all season, and they’ve been very tight games each time, so we just wanted to show how good we were.”
This was the final game of the 2022-23 season for the Tigers, but seniors Lance Ralsten and John McKeon know it’s only the beginning.
“I would say that the program is definitely going in a great direction,” McKeon said. “Personally, I think someday in the not-so-distant future we’ll have an NCAA Division I team, a rink and also we’re going to just re-up the club team… I think the program’s going in a great direction. It’s exciting.”
“Clemson hockey’s been going up for four years, and it’s gonna keep going that way,” Ralsten said. “I know we can compete with anybody in this rink… we’ve done it time and time again throughout the season. Up here, we fell a little short in the first game, but… we can compete with anybody here.”