Class A Title in Hand, Plante Heads for the Woods
SAINT PAUL, MN.
Bruce Plante remains the most popular interviewee in Minnesota High School Hockey state tournament press conference history. It’s just that the primary question asked of the Hermantown Hawks coach shifted a little this year.
After the Hawks won their only previous championship, they returned to the state tournament regularly, and for six years in a row, they won their first two state tournament games but somehow managed to lose the Class A championship game in all six of those years. They lost in all sorts of excruciating manner, with late goals, off-shinpad goals, fluke goals and various cruel twists of fate that made the annual question simple: “How long can Hermantown go losing consecutive state finals?”
“It’s pretty hard to block it out,” said Plante, after the semifinals. “Summer, winter, spring and fall, I can’t escape it. I go into Wal-Mart, and an 80-year-old guy asks me ‘When are you going to win that thing?’ About the only place I can get away from it is when I go fishing, or out in the duck blind.”
This year, to Plante’s ultimate relief and pleasure, Hermantown overwhelmed everybody in Class A to win the state title, sending the thriving little Duluth suburb into hockey ecstacy, and especially Coach Plante. Plante posed with his players for celebratory photos, then running out to shoot his own cellphone-camera photos of his piled-up players.
Afterward, the questioning shifted to two new directions: 1. Is he going to retire? And, 2. Will Hermantown now switch up to Class AA?
Plante is not ready to answer either question yet. But his Hawks have clearly risen above the rest of Class A. Breck was a powerhouse team, which had come to Duluth two days after Marshall had stunned Duluth East 4-0, and hammered the Hilltoppers 6-1. Well-coached, deep and speedy, Breck had no chance against Hermantown, which administered a 5-0 whipping that was pretty much settled in a 3-0 first period.
That 5-0 victory was substantial, but nothing like the semifinal, where Hermantown beat St. Paul Academy 7-1, or the first-day quarterfinals, where the Hawks crushed Litchfield-Dassel/Cokato 11-3. That’s a 23-4 goal margin for the state tournament.
Counting backwards, include the 8-0 Section 7A final romp over a very good Hibbing-Chisholm team, a 9-0 semifinal rout of a very good Greenway/Nashwauk-Keewatin team, and a 12-2 opening 7A rout against a promising Eveleth-Gilbert outfit, raises the ante to a 52-6 goal margin in all playoff games. The final regular-season game was a 7-0 romp over Hibbing, which means Hermantown finished the season having won its final seven games by a 59-6 edge in goals.
While Hermantown broke the six-year hex of losing in the title game, the Hawks also were establishing a streak of putting six straight opponents into running time, before letting up the offense to smother Breck with a total defensive effort in the final. The state tournament program lists Hermantown as 25-1-1 coming to state, with only a 4-2 loss to Bemidji staining the record. “We also lost to Minnetonka,” Plante said, correcting the ledger. So it should have been 24-2-1 coming in, and finishing at 27-2-1.
As usual, the heroes in Hawk outfits were many, but they all bought into the scheme that the collective team benefit is more important than the individual stats. Still, it was a spectacular first line that included Cole Koepke, Jesse Jacques, and Ryan Sandelin, and a puck-rushing first defense pair of Wyatt Aamodt and Eric Gotz. Back in goal, Luke Olson was nearly perfect, even though he was totally overshadowed by the goal-scoring antics of his teammates. As it turned out, that whole starting unit – Koepke, Jacques, Sandelin, Aamodt, Gotz and Olson – all made the 12-man all-tournament team.
In the 7A final, Jacques had a hat trick; in the state tournament opener against Litchfield-Dassel/Cokato, Koepke had four goals; in the state semifinal against SPA, Sandelin scored two goals; in the final against Breck, Koepke, Jacques and Sandelin each scored one.
“It doesn’t seem to matter, but each game a different member of that line comes up with the big goals,” said Plante. “They’re all over 20 goals and Koepke has 40. He’s more of a sniper, but they’re all such great players. This is probably the best transition team I’ve ever had. And you look at that first unit, when you can put the best five players in the game out there at one, it makes a huge difference.”
It almost seemed that the Hawks decided five goals was enough, and they just turned up the defensive screws to stifle Breck through the third period to make sure of winning the game and the title for their beloved coach.
“This is such a good group of kids,” Plante said. “And we could be pretty decent next year, too.”
That brought up the new line of questioning. Will he retire? “I’ll think about it,” he said. “I love coaching, and I love the kids.” Will he consider moving up to Class AA? “You can move up every two years, so we’ve got another year where we are before we consider it,” Plante said. “We’ve still got a problem with depth at the Double-A level.”
Then Bruce Plante had to go. He was a little late, he said, to tend to the maple syrup trees on his property and he was going out to work with them. We can add tending maple syrup trees to fishing and duck blinds when it comes to Bruce Plante getting away from the never-ending questions.
SAINT PAUL, MN.
The big argument at the start of the state hockey tournament was how could Stillwater, at 26-1-1, be overlooked as No. 1 seed among Class AA teams while Eden Prairie got that nod despite a 19-7-2 record?
Nobody said anything about Wayzata, which also had taken its lumps during a 19-8-1 season, and a program that had never produced a state hockey champion. Nobody said anything, either, about Grand Rapids, coming down from 7AA with high hopes and a spectacular offense.
But when the huge crowds finally cleared Saint Paul’s Xcel Energy Center, it was the Wayzata Trojans who skated off with the Class AA championship, beating Eden Prairie 5-3 with the final margin determined by an empty-net goal.
It was more than just a victory for the common worker-bee over the flashy superstars. Other teams had the standouts, including Casey Mittelstadt of Eden Prairie, Micah Johnson who emerged as a game-breaking talent for Grand Rapids, and Class A star Ethan Johnson from Thief River Falls, who added to his school record goal tally with a hat trick in the quarterfinals, and his 50th goal in the third-place victory.
Wayzata coach Pat O’Leary, meanwhile, just kept on rotating four balanced lines, every shift, every game. The Trojans got past Lake Conference rival Burnsville 3-1 in a grinding first game, spotting the Braves a 1-0 lead before Mark Senden, Luke Paterson and Dillon Riley scored second-period goals. Then Wayzata settled the top-seed controversy by stopping Stillwater 2-1 in a scintillating finish. With a tournament record 22,244 fans watching, goaltender Alex Schilling seemed set to make Logan Lindstrand’s first-period goal stand up for a 1-0 victory until a crazy finish.
With 1:35 remaining, Griffin Ness scored on a breakaway for Wayzata and a seemingly secure 2-0 lead. But Stillwater, goalie pulled, swarmed Schilling and Jackson Cates scored with 1:00 remaining to make it 2-1. Stillwater got several more point-blank chances in the closing seconds, and both brothers, Jackson and Noah Cates, got swipes at the puck. In the final second, Wayzata defenseman Grant Anderson purposely knocked the net off its moorings. The refs ruled the game had ended, and a top-down video showed the clock going from 0:02, to 0:01, and to 0:00 just a millisecond before Anderson’s act. So the refs were right. With the crowd standing and screaming for either side, the scene could only be imagined what might have happened had there been a half-second left and the proper call would have been for a penalty shot!
In the other semifinal, Eden Prairie got a head start when Mittelstadt scored a power-play goal at 14:13 of the first period against Grand Rapids. The Eagles made it 2-0 when Michael Graham zipped around the defense to score with 0:03 left in a first period dominated by Eden Prairie and its 17-8 edge in shots.
But Grand Rapids surprised the Eagles with a stirring start to the second period. Micah Miller scored at 1:29, on a power play, and Alex Adams followed with a goal 11 seconds later, for a 2-2 tie. Mittelstadt came back to score short-handed and again on a steal prompted by a careless Rapids clearing pass, and Cole Sullivan made it 5-2 in the last minute of the middle period.
For Grand Rapids, it was a letdown after a stirring 3-2 overtime victory over Bemidji in the quarterfinals. Alex Pollock had both goals for Bemidji, but, trailing 1-0 after a period, Gavic Hain scored at 1:24 and Micah Miller connected on a power play for a 2-1 Thunderhawks lead after two.
The second period ended in spectacular fashion in that game, as Miller broke free up the left side on a short-handed rush. “I was screaming at him as he went by the bench that he had 4 seconds,” said first-year coach Trent Klatt. Miller cut to the net and scored a spectacular goal as he somersaulted across the crease. As the Thunderhawks celebrated a 3-1 lead, they noted that the clock showed 0:00, and, sure enough, the clock had expired an instant before the goal.
When Pollock scored at 0:16 of the third to tie it 2-2, that score stood until overtime, when Marshall Mattson carried in behind the net and passed out front where Alex Adams knocked it in at 2:06 of sudden-death. If Alex Adams’s name is familiar, he’s the same senior winger who scored with 6 seconds left to beat Duluth East 6-5 in the Section 7AA final.
After the deflating loss to Eden Prairie in the semifinals, the Thunderhawks came out flat against Stillwater in the third-place game and fell behind 2-0 in the first period. It stayed taht way until the third period, when Grand Rapids finally kicked it in gear, for goals by Branden Mark and Drake Anderson, 45 seconds apart in the first minute, then got a goal from Mitchell Mattson at 11:48 to capture the third-place trophy 3-2.
