Cleveland Women's Classic: Tournament Recap

This past weekend, Team CLE hosted the Cleveland Women's Classic at the Mentor Civic Center. It was a very fun tournament of competitive hockey and a great turnout. Thank you to all of the teams who made the trek to Ohio to participate!

Team Navy went 3-0 during the round robin portion of the tournament, soundly beating the Buffalo Regals 7-0 on Friday night and the Chesapeake Bay Lightning 5-1 on Saturday morning. Saturday night's game against the Southern Thunder proved to be a much closer game with Team CLE fighting for a 2-1 win. The three wins secured Team Navy's presence in the championship game against the Rochester Edge on Sunday.

Rochester showed up to the championship game with only 9 skaters (rumor has it, a top player went home early with food poisoning and/or because she wanted to catch the Giants game). Team CLE hoped to take advantage of the Edge's short bench but ultimately came up short. Rochester scored three quick goals and, despite fighting back to tie the game 3-3 (and some high-quality chances after pulling the goalie with under a minute left in the game), Team CLE fell short and lost 4-3. It was an exciting, fast game, and hopefully the two teams will see each other again later in the season for a rematch.

Team CLE Navy's newest addition, Vanessa Gagnon, led the team with 6 goals and 3 assists on the weekend, averaging more than 2 points per game. Hey, welcome to the team, Vanessa! :)

Vanessa Gagnon wins the face off against Southern Thunder.

Lindsay Glavan goes in 1-1 against the Southern Thunder goaltender.

Power forward Diana Bell takes the body against a Southern Thunder defenseman.

Meanwhile, better news for Team White! After defeating Southern Thunder C and the Buffalo Ice Breakers early in the tournament, the women of Team CLE fell short against the Mizconducts on Saturday night in a 1-0 loss topped off by a late-in-the-game ejection of top forward Amy Loftus after a colorful scuffle with a Mizconducts player.

Despite the late loss, Team White made it to the championship game on Sunday and faced the Mizconducts once more - and this time, Team White came out on top with a 4-3 win. Katie Palinski led Team White with 4 goals and 2 assists on the weekend.

Defenseman Allie Sharon carries the puck up ice.

Team CLE White: Champions!

Team CLE Navy plays next in Detroit on November 22nd and 23rd against the O'Leary Hawks, Mission and Detroit Revolution. Team CLE White travels to Pittsburgh the same weekend to faceoff against Central Pitt and the Chesapeake Bay Lightning.

Fundraiser wrap up, synthetic ice, and yes: another Canadian on Team CLE.

Hey guys, it's been a while. Let me catch you up.

The fundraiser held at Around the Corner in Lakewood was a great success. We had over 100 people come out and support our team, enjoying beer and pizza, and participating in raffle prizes as well. Proceeds raised will help offset the costs of our season. Many thanks to the crew that organized as well as all our friends and family that came out. I was tasked with helping Rhonda collect money from people on their way in, which was fine with me. Rhonda did the hard work, I literally just put money in an envelope and drank the beer, and ate the wings and pizza that Eric periodically brought us. Not bad eh?

Speaking of 'eh,' guess what? We have another Canadian on the team! I think it's cute that our say 15 person roster has 3 Canadians on it. And, I think it's great that a person can move to Cleveland, ask around and easily find a women's ice hockey team appropriate to the level of that individual. So, welcome Vanessa, can't wait to see you in action at our tournament this weekend.

Since our fundraiser two weekends ago, we've had three solid practices. Tonight was on synthetic ice at Ohio Hockey Academy. I'd never skated on synthetic ice, and it was certainly different but I encourage everyone to try to make it at some point. We have a few more practices scheduled there.

When I first got on the ice, I felt like my body wanted to move forward but my feet weren't moving. I did get used to it, but still of course there's nothing like skating on the real thing (by real thing I mean artificial ice in a temperature controlled arena of course).

That said, what was nice about the synthetic ice and tonight's practice was that it was a chance to work on skills. I absolutely loved working on simple puck handling and passing drills. The other thing I enjoyed was having an instructor reminding us of various tips throughout the hour long ice session. My favorite was probably the advice that if we just puck handle normally and get the D shifting weight to an outside edge (ie committing to a direction), and then just go in the other direction, we'd have a bunch of success and could forget the toe drags. Poor toe drag. Just can't get any respect.

Anyway, I really enjoyed it from a skills perspective. Maybe next time we'll learn how to do spread eagles. Do you know what that is? Sounds terrible. I guess another name for it is open hips skating, which also sounds terrible. But anyway: This. I want to do learn to do it. Who wants to teach me?

Ok, I think that's everything. See you guys on Friday for our first game of the tournament!