2013-14 Year in Review, Part V: Boston College Women’s Hockey

One thing we can say for Boston College these days is that the school takes pride in its hockey. At one point, the men’s team was the only power, but now Boston College women’s hockey is elite in its own right.

It was another solid year for the ladies in their 2013-14 campaign, even having lost a player in Alex Carpenter to Team USA in the Sochi Olympics.

2013-14 Boston College Women’s Hockey: The Regular Season

The Eagles actually played their first game in September, an exhibition against a Canadian school, which they won. They officially opened their season on the same day as the men’s first exhibition game, October 6, and just like them, the ladies won: in a Hockey East contest, Boston College claimed a 5-1 victory to open the year right.

With a weekend sweep of St. Lawrence, which included a Haley Skarupa hat trick in one of the games, #2 Boston College women’s hockey improved to 3-0 out of the gate. They would take their first loss of the season on October 16 against New Hampshire at Kelley Rink, followed by a pair of wins over Ivy League (ECAC, technically) schools in Yale and Dartmouth to move to 5-1.

Yes, the Syracuse Orange have a women’s hockey team, and Boston College lost to them, but that was followed by four more wins in a row, all of them in Hockey East: two over Providence, one over Vermont and one over Northeastern. In fact, the Eagles scored 22 goals across those four games to rocket to 9-2 by Veterans’ Day.

Boston College women’s hockey was establishing a pattern whereby their losing streaks, if streaks at all, were brief. As a matter of fact, it was not until tournament play in March that Boston College lost consecutive games. The Eagles hit the closest they would come to a snag from mid-November until early January (keep in mind they only played nine games over that stretch because of the winter break), where they went 4-2-3. In spite of that, they still had a 13-4-3 record on the second week in January and were still ranked in the top ten.

Then came some long win streaks for the Eagles. Their January 12 tilt with Northeastern began a seven-game win streak, all but one of which was officially a Hockey East meeting: the last of those was their Beanpot semifinal against the Boston University Terriers.

In their Beanpot “tune-up” game on February 8, they were shut out by UConn, but then returned to form to defeat the aforementioned Huskies in the Beanpot final, just a day after the men won their fifth in a row. 2014 was the second time Boston College women’s hockey and men’s hockey won the Beanpot in the same season, with two titles less than 24 hours apart. Notably, the men and women both defeated Northeastern to do it.

This feat sent the Eagles soaring again, as another seven-game win streak unfolded. In the process, for the first time in program history, Boston College women’s hockey won the Hockey East regular-season title. The moment happened as the Eagles defeated Maine by a 4-1 score in Orono, improving to an impressive 23-5-3 (16-2-1) on the season. Boston College would ultimately finish nine points ahead of second-place BU in the standings with 37 out of a possible 42 points in conference play.

Unquestionably, the ladies dominated the conference in the regular season, rising to #6 nationally. How would they fare in the playoffs when it mattered most?

Next page: Postseason and after the season