Archbishop Ryan Raiders

DELMONT ~ Saturday night is a nice time to take a drive and watch a little hockey and tonight’s adventure took us to Center Ice Arena for a Class A matchup between Deer Lakes and Johnstown. Yes, Johnstown, who usually plays its games at the War Memorial, had to rent a chartered bus to go to Delmont to play a makeup home game from earlier this month. The Johnstown program has been in disarray for a few years and has not fielded a winning team since 1996. Dedicated former Team President Matt Wincer, who continued to bring kids into the program despite its losing ways, was ousted from his position at the beginning of last season, after the PIHL brass complained to the Johnstown School Board, because of Mr Wincer’s his insistence at PIHL Board of Governors meetings that the PIHL needed to be audited in a situation revolving around double billing the teams at the War Memorial for security and other issues, which have still never been resolved nor investigated. Anyway ten players were on the bench for this game for Johnstown’s Varsity team. Deer Lakes has had an interesting season itself under Al Palowski, who’s team is on the verge of playoff extinction for only the third time in the past eight years, which is very impressive despite the low numbers of players playing hockey in Deer Lakes. The Lancers road will be that much tougher due to the academic ineligibility of All Star Rich Bigley and Brendan Orris, who have provided a significant amount of offense for the team. Deer Lakes came out and took control of this game from the outset outshooting Johnstown 17-3 in the first period. Garrett Kurtz opened the scoring at 12:45 for a 1-0 lead. At Matt Romutis took a Kurtz feed and beat Pete Bearjar to open up a 2-0 DL advantage at 7:51. Deer Lakes extended the lead at 7:51 of the first as Jason Graney fired a wrist shot upstairs on the glove side for a 3-0 lead. The 2nd period was all Deer Lakes as they fired 18 more shots at Bearjar, who made several spectacular saves, but the Trojans could only muster 3 shots on the Lancers Jiri Frkal. Finally at 3:56 of the middle period, Stefan Krisay weaved his way around the Johnstown zone and beat Bearjar to make it 4-0. The third period was the Mike Watson show as he scored the natural hat trick starting with a slapshot at 14:51, beating the Trojan defense at 10:42 and finishing a nice passing play from Jason Graney at 5:56 on the power play. Johnstown’s Dan Chorik broke Frkal’s shutout bid in the third period on a breakaway, but Deer Lakes moved within two points of Steel Valley setting up a must win game with Mars on Monday night.