Seneca Valley Raiders

North Allegheny 9 Norwin 0 DELMONT – Norwin has struggled this season to a 1-8-0 mark as the season hits the midway mark. Head Coach Dave Warren has his team entered in the upcoming Pa Hockey Scholastic Showcase against the likes of Central Catholic, undefeated West Allegheny and of course North Allegheny, the defending Director’s Cup champions. The Knights will look to start the second half of their season tonight as they have competed at the Class AAA level, instead of take the easy route as others have done in the Open Division. Norwin’s hockey program will be much better off in the long run by competing at a higher level as their Junior Varsity and Freshman numbers continue to grow toward fielding three full teams for the first time in recent memory. North Allegheny’s hockey program has never struggled with numbers and Tom Pandolfo has a very talented group of younger players, who are beginning to get comfortable at the Varsity level. The Tigers are now part of a process, which they should be each year, of the chase for the Penguins Cup. With 2005’s Penguins Cup fresh enough in memory to be motivation to get back there, this is a team that dominated Class AAA a year ago only to fall short of their goal. With Mt Lebanon firmly entrenched as the favorite someone in Class AAA needs to claim that they want to challenge the Blue Devils and that list is becoming shorter and will get shorter before we get to March’s playoffs. North Allegheny, Bethel Park and Meadville look to be there with possibly a handful of other wannabees and my question is who? The team who is even thinking about it better have goaltending, play strong physical defense and be able to survive the playoffs early rounds. Norwin played the first period like a team that is not 1-8-0 and skated with the Tigers stride for stride. A couple of penalty exchanges on the power play led to a 4 on 4 situation with 3 minutes to go in the opening period and Norwin took a penalty to put NA on the power play. Mike Pochan made several nice stops on the Tiger power play as the shots rang to 9-1 in favor of North Allegheny. Jeff Mihalo had a nice chance for the Knights with just under a minute to play but Adam Lutty made the save. Pochan stopped Chris Simanic with just 2 seconds to play in the first. At 14:41 of the second period, Wes Waldschmidt picked up a wide shot off the boards and slipped it past Pochan to give NA a 1-0 lead. Chris Simanic picked up his own rebound at 11:41 on the power play after another couple of nice stops by Pochan to make it 2-0. After Norwin changed goaltender’s, Danny Gaertner greeted the new Knight goaltender Stewart with a quick goal to make it 3-0 with 11:15 remaining in the period. At 8:20 of the 2nd, Paul Dittrich walked down the slot and unleashed a wrist shot up under the crossbar to make it 4-0 after a scoreless first. With 57 seconds remaining in the period on the power play, Alan Halapin unloaded a wicked wrist shot high over the glove side of Stewart to make the count 5-0 and the shots in the period 24-7 for the middle period. Norwin just ran out of gas and any hope in the third as the Tigers turned the game into cruise control and added four more goals and rung up a shot total of 43-10 for a 9-0 victory over the Knights. Danny Gaertner scored on a backhand at 13:16, Chris Simanic scored on a deke and backhand at 9:14, Nick Vaglia scored at 5:44, and Chris Gilson finished a nice back door pass from Simanic with 1:42.