After Sweet Home’s varsity hockey team won a state championship in 2018, the program began a down period.
Dwindling numbers on their roster forced the team to eventually merge with North Tonawanda and Depew just to stay afloat. But despite that challenge and not much in terms of veteran leadership – the team has no seniors – they are improving day by day and learning by gaining experience, according to coach Josh Montalbo.
“We're a young team – we have one of the youngest rosters in all of Western New York and we're looking for growth, more than anything,” Montalbo said. “We want to be competitive in every game. We want to win our non-league games, and we want to find a way to be competitive and keep scores close in our league games.
“We play teams like Clarence and Williamsville North and Orchard Park and Lancaster, and those schools have veteran rosters and they’re well-coached teams. We feel from a talent standpoint that we're a lot closer to some of the other teams around here, but we're still young and inexperienced and we still have a lot of learning to do.”
That was evident in a recent game against Clarence, where the program found themselves behind the eight-ball early and found themselves chasing the score for the rest of the contest.
“That game is a good example of how small lapses in our game are going to turn into a wide gap in results,” Montalbo said. “We had periods in the game where we were really close, but if we're not staying on top of the little details in our game, then we’ll lose. As long as we can minimize those lapses and pay attention to the small things, then we’ll keep getting better and better.”
That they have. There was nowhere to go but up by that point, and since then Sweet Home/Depew/North Tonawanda have gone 4-4-1 and have put together a nice four-game unbeaten streak heading into a showdown with Lancaster on Wednesday night at the Northtown Center.
“So far this season, we've shown to have a lot more cohesion, a lot more understanding and definitely a much more mature team compared to what we were in the past,” Montalbo said. “But we're still gaining experience, so there's still a lot of bumps to get over. But I think the longer this season goes, the more improved our team will become.”
The recent uptick in the team’s performance has been due to the play of a few skaters who Montalbo thought were playing particularly well.
“Ryan Huber’s our captain, and he's definitely the guy that's kind of driving our team this year,” Montalbo said. “Noah Clendenen’s a young player with a ton of potential, and he's a big-time player for us too.
“Ricky Dentenger’s a defenseman that we're looking for to drive a lot of offense for us, and Guiseppe Surdi and Steven Compeau have really come on offensively as of late as well. Our goalie Max Battel is a younger kid – he's a sophomore, but he’s really shown that he can handle a lot of work and be a real rock for us in net. So we’ve got some talent, for sure, but if they can continue to grow into the players we know they can be, we’ll be much better down the road.”
Photo Credits Julia Elmedawar/Sweet Home High School
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