There’s a rhyme about the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead: “When she was good she was very, very good; when she was bad she was horrid.”

 

By Mitch Silver

There’s a rhyme about the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead: “When she was good she was very, very good; when she was bad she was horrid.” What else can you say about a hockey team that loses games to The King School and Wooster Academy by scores of 7-1 and then turns around to smack down The Harvey School and Fieldston Academy by 7-3 and 8-0?

Rye Country Day Boys’ Hockey coach Erik Kallio says, “Yes, sometimes we play down to the level of the competition. And sometimes, a good team will take us out of our game altogether.”

On the other hand, there are times when the whole thing comes together beautifully. Such were the second and third periods the Wildcats played against Fieldston at home on Senior Day, February 10. Postponed for 48 hours by snow, the game saw the boys emerge from the dressing room in their hot pink Breast Cancer Awareness uniforms with a pink ribbon next to the school logo.

Up by 1-0 after a sloppily played first period, the boys in pink took the Eagles apart in a most unladylike fashion. Patrick Kissell fed fellow senior Ryan Jaeger for an early score, and then Jaeger scored again five minutes later to make it 3-0.

Four minutes after that, Kissell decided to put one in himself. At the other end of the ice, junior goalkeeper Eddie Massaro had a close-up view of his defensemen manhandling the slower, less skillful Eagles. In fact, the Wildcats’ D permitted not a single odd-man Fieldston rush for the rest of the game.

The score was 5-0 when the whistle ended the second period. That’s when the players skated off and the crowd lined up for the Closest to the Cone contest for charity. Like horseshoes, the idea was to skim a puck from the edge of the rink so it landed as close as possible to a red parking cone at center ice. The forty pucks that were tossed hit each other, but not the cone. Oh well, all in a good cause.

The Wildcats picked up where they left off in the third period. Senior defenseman Billy Grossman made it 6-0 with ten minutes to go. Fellow back-liner Alex Berger, a junior, scored two minutes later, and his teammates threw the puck to the coaching staff as a keepsake.

The only question left was, would Massaro get his shutout? A couple of fainthearted Eagle rushes were turned aside in the final minute, and Coach Kallio’s men iced the win with another score to make the final read 8-0.

The Wildcats hit the road after the game, traveling to the Eaglebrook School in Deerfield, Massachusetts to take on Berwick Academy, Maine’s oldest educational institution, before continuing on to Rhode Island for a clash with Portsmouth Abbey. The locals dropped both games by identical 4-2 scores before returning to Rye to take on Moses Brown post-press time.

This weekend it’s the Fairchester Athletic Association Tournament. Semifinals were held yesterday and the finals will be tomorrow, Saturday, at The Harvey School in Katonah.