The Bemidji State University men’s hockey team regained both league dominance and national prominence this past season with a 22-16-3 record.<\/p>\n
The Beavers paced the Western Collegiate Hockey Association from wire to wire en route to their 22nd conference crown, and they ranked among the nation’s top 20 for 14 weeks.<\/p>\n
An opening sweep of Bowling Green at home began a 13-game unbeaten streak that led BSU to its first WCHA regular season title. With a 20-6-2-2 league record, the Beavers claimed the historic MacNaughton Cup as regular-season champions and earned top seed in the WCHA’s new playoff format. After discarding Northern Michigan in a best-of-three quarterfinal, the Beavers fell to Bowling Green in the semifinal.<\/p>\n
The season’s end brought a flood of individual awards. Michael Bitzer<\/b> became the first BSU player to earn All-WCHA First Team recognition as the league coaches’ Player of the Year. Phil Marinaccio, Gerry Fitzgerald<\/b> and Zach Whitecloud<\/b> also received All-WCHA honors. With a team-best 29 points, Marinaccio was named to the second team, while Fitzgerald earned a spot on the third team and Whitecloud was selected to the All-Rookie Team. Head Coach Tom Serratore<\/b> was voted WCHA Coach of the Year.<\/p>\n
Bitzer, who ranked among the country’s top five goaltenders in every statistical category, including an NCAA-best 1.71 goals against average, picked up All-America First Team West recognition from the American Hockey Coaches Association. He also was a finalist for the Mike Richter Award, annually given to the nation’s top goaltender, and was BSU’s first top 10 finalist for the Hobey Baker Memorial Award.<\/p>\n
In addition, Brendan Harms<\/b> won the Senior CLASS award in a nationwide vote of coaches, media and fans. The prestigious honor goes to the year’s most outstanding senior student-athlete in Division I men’s hockey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Bemidji State University men\u2019s hockey team regained both league dominance and national prominence this past season with a 22-16-3 record.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28628,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[958],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-magazine"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28627"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28629,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28627\/revisions\/28629"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemidjistate.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}