Short-handed M’s start season at home

• Homer squad has only 14 players but wealth of experience

by Aaron Selbig
Homer Tribune

In its fifth year, the Homer High hockey program – which started out as a rag tag group under the tutelage of the late Kevin Bell and now plays in a beautiful arena bearing his name – has had its share of growing pains. While powerhouse hockey schools like Soldotna and Wasilla are forced to cut prospective players every year, the Mariners – who have never won a North Star Conference game – face a continuous struggle to find them.
“That’s what we’re up against and now we’re just going to try to deal with it,” said Head Coach Buck Laukitis. “We just have to keep playing. On the bright side, we’re finally getting more players in than we’re losing.”
Laukitis’s team – which opened it’s season last Friday with an 11-0 blanking of the Kenai JV squad – will face its first big challenge on Friday night, when they take on Soldotna at Kevin Bell Arena.
And they’ll do it with just 14 players – barely enough to put two lines on the ice.
“I’ve told the parents that if we have 10 kids and a goalie, we’ll go ahead and play varsity,” said Laukitis. “The kids we have are pretty damn good but we really need to have three lines.”
Homer would have at least six more players available Friday, added Laukitis, if not for an Oct. 5 decision by the Alaska School Activities Association Board of Directors to continue barring hockey players from the Russian Old Believer villages from playing for Homer.
Laukitis, hockey mom Kim Duggar and others worked for nearly two years to convince ASAA to allow a waiver for the Russian players, many of whom grow up playing hockey with the Homer Hockey Association only to be forced to stop when they reach high school age. The ASAA board, fearful of the precedent that might be set by the waiver, rejected it.
“It’s unfortunate. The Russian kids come up through the program and then they just get stuck,” said Laukitis.
But the Mariners will soldier on – just like they do every year – and they’ll do it with a small but experienced team.
Goalkeeper Luke Eckert returns to the team this season, backed up by freshman goalie Ben Handy, as do standouts Kyle Wisner, Reni Robbin, Carl Swanson, Robert Lewis and Russ Merritt, who may have been the M’s best all-around player last season.
Already, after barely a month of practice, the team is ahead of where they were last year at this time, said Laukitis.
“I’m super happy with this group of kids,” he said. “We’ve had a lot of fun so far and they are moving the puck around really well. We’ve got some great kids and a lot of them are good hockey players. We’re a good little hockey team – we’re just short-handed.”

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Posted by Newsroom on Nov 11th, 2009 and filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.