ASU Women’s Hockey: Sun Devils prove tough contender in Las Vegas

(Photo: Liesl Babicka/WCSN)

The first time the Sun Devils clashed with the Colorado Buffalos this season, back in mid-November, CU swept the weekend with a 13-3 goal differential.

In Arizona State’s opening game of the showcase against No. 1-seeded Colorado, the Devils fell 3-1, bringing the score within a goal late in the game.

“All the hard work we’ve been putting in all season, all the better teams we’ve been playing … we’ve played them before,” defenseman Amy Gulliksen said. “We’ve been practicing all season for this moment and I think we did pretty good. I think we gave them a tough game.”

Although the Sun Devils fell to the Buffalos to start the weekend off, the game is a good testament to see just how much the team has progressed through the season.

“That was a great, great, 60 minutes of hockey,” head coach Lindsey Ellis said. ‘Unfortunately the goals were just lazy mistakes, but with a team like this [Colorado] capitalizes on that.”

But for ASU, it was just that – lazy mistakes.

The Sun Devils were able to keep the Buffalo offense at bay much more than in games past. Even with Gulliksen settling into the transition from forward to defense, ASU held their ground. The devils were able to keep a similar pace to keep the goal differential low versus giving Colorado the chance to count them out.

“They’re a very strong team for a female team,” Ellis said. “You don’t always see that in female hockey. The shots are that consistent, that strong. We knew it was going to be tough.”

Very possibly, this is in part due to the team finding their confidence. At the first run in, over half of the team was still getting used to the speed of collegiate hockey. Now with more games under their belts, the Sun Devils have grown into a team ready to compete at a high caliber level.

‘We’ve all know each other a lot better,” Gulliksen said. “If we mess up, we know we’re all going to have each other’s backs no matter what.”

Junior forward Alyssa Ayers noted that the team has grown a lot and have slowly figured out what works for them and what doesn’t.

The prime example of that would be a 5-on-3 power play for CU that netminder Jordan Nash-Boulden and ASU successfully killed in the third period.

“That was rough,” Ayers said. “We killed that. That was so rough. KC (McGinley) and Sheridan (Gloyd) were out there for pretty much the whole thing. I was out there for about half. I had to get off because I was dead. We played the triangle pretty well and that all results from practicing that too. Lindsey (Ellis) likes to give us those opportunities to practice at Oceanside so when we get into those situations in games we know what we’re doing.”

As the backbone of the team, Ellis credited Nash-Boulden to keeping the team in the game.

“She played unbelievable,” the head coach said. “That could have easily been a 10-1 game and it was only 3-1 so she kept us in it for a whole 60 minutes.”

Ayers scored the team’s lone goal on a power play six minutes into the third period and although it was one, it symbolizes the growth of ASU’s women’s hockey of the course of the program’s third season.

The Sun Devils next face rival Grand Canyon Saturday afternoon, with a 1:30 p.m. puck drop in the final game of pool play before semifinals begin Saturday night.