Valley native Brette Pettet leads SSM to National Championship
Back to back: SSM girls prep repeats as 19U USA Hockey national champions
http://www.southernminn.com/faribault_daily_news
Call the Sabres locked in. Call them tough. Call them clutch.
Call them champions.
The Shattuck-St. Mary’s girls prep hockey team repeated as national champions, winning the USA Hockey Nationals Girls Tier I 19U title Monday with a 3-1 win over the Chicago Mission in Rochester, Michigan.
Senior Brette Pettet had the winning and insurance goals for the Sabres, who came back from a 1-0 deficit after one period of play.
The girls prep team was the lone SSM squad still in play for a title when it took the ice Monday afternoon. The boys U16 team lost a 2-1 game earlier in the day, while the boys prep and girls U16 teams fell in the semifinals Sunday.
“We knew this morning that the boys U16 had lost, so they knew we were the last team standing,” girls prep coach Gordie Stafford said. “Our program, it is a program, regardless of gender, the teams always support one another. They play for their school, and that was important for them.”
SSM was without leading goal scorer Maureen Murphy, who had to sit out the championship after taking a game misconduct penalty in Sunday’s 1-0 semifinal win over the Mid Fairfield CT Stars. As a result, SSM rotated defensemen into the third-line center spot, ensuring that line had a definite presence all game in what Stafford called a full-team win.
A group of Sabres that’s handled pretty much everything thrown at it over the last few years steeled itself a little more knowing Murphy was out for the championship.
“I think it’s not as if you need extra incentive in a national championship game,” Stafford said. “But they’re driven people anyway, and that gave them another reason. Just this whole team, but the senior group is just so cohesive and they just love playing in those games. They played in so many of those games and I think it’s almost like once you’ve played in those games and you’ve experienced the exhilaration of those games, you’re not nervous for them, you’re excited for them. That’s how they are. Just unflappable too.”
The Mission’s Hannah Alt scored 7 minutes, 17 seconds into the first, and it was 1-0 after one. Becca Foggia scored at the 9:50 mark of the second to tie the game 1-1.
Pettet scored on a wrist shot from the right circle on a rush at the 15:51 mark to give the Sabres the lead. She added a power-play goal at 15:12 in the third from the left circle to help seal the win.
Stafford called it fitting for Pettet, who as an eighth-grader in 2013, had the tying and game-winning goals for the U16 team in the championship — a win that started a four-year streak of championships for the SSM U16 girls.
