CALGARY - The final weekend of the regular season is upon the Dinos women's hockey team as they take on the SAIT Trojans in a match that will decide who walks away with the first place position in the ACAC.
Currently the Dinos sit atop the board with 34 points while SAIT is four points behind them and in second. This will continue to be the case providing SAIT cannot win both games in regular time; the ACAC decides ties based on the unorthodox stat of wins in regulation time and SAIT is superior in that regard. So, the Dinos need just one point out of the weekend to clinch top spot and home-ice advantage throughout the playoffs.
Regardless of the standings, this series will be intense as both of these teams have run roughshod over the rest of the league with SAIT holding six more wins over their next nearest rival.
So far this season the Dinos have gone 2-1 against SAIT, losing the first pairing before winning the second and shutting the Trojans out in the third matchup.
Recently, the Dinos have been riding a five game winning streak ending a January where they've gone 7-1. The Trojans are riding their own six game winning streak, going 6-2 in January due to dropping two games to MacEwan College.
A key matchup in this match will be in net; starters Lindsay Coghlan and Katie Urness are the goalies with the most ACAC wins this season, Urness with 16 and Coghlan with 10. Urness, the Dinos' keeper, leads the league with a 1.05 GAA and a 0.939 save percentage while Coghlan holds down third place statistics with 2.14 GAA and a 0.911 save percentage.
Next week the playoffs begin and both SAIT and UC get a week off. The other four teams will participate in the best-of-three first round where the sixth ranked team plays the third seed and the fifth plays fourth. Currently MacEwan and Red Deer are neck and neck for third spot with Red Deer ahead by one point. Fifth and sixth spots are going to be filled by NAIT and Mount Royal, with NAIT ahead by three points meaning Mount Royal is likely to remain in last spot.
With this in mind the Dinos hope to roll into the post season with some momentum; rookie Shelby Davey is confident the team will pull through in the end.
“I'm feeling good, I have confidence in these girls, in the end we always pull through,” she said.
The puck drops in the SAIT Campus Centre Friday night at 7 p.m. before going to the Olympic Oval on Saturday night, with face-off at 7:30 p.m.
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