With a tentative schedule, the EWU women’s hockey club never knows what to expect.

Earlier in October, the Eagles have played two games with the Spokane women’s team. “We had two games so far, we were actually leading in the first game, pretty much the whole game until the end. The other team tied it up and we went to overtime,” Connor said.

“We lost in overtime, but then the second game, the next day, we won 3 to nothing,” Connor said. During the first game against Spokane women’s team, the Eagles lost 4-3 in overtime. After they won the second game against the Spokane women’s team, Connor was very excited to see his team win due to the fact that Spokane is a highly skilled team.

The club was supposed to play Seattle this past weekend, but Seattle canceled because they could not get enough players for the game. As a club, sometimes it is difficult for them to rely on their competition to always be there. “We basically [have to] just rely on them being able to play. [Because] we’re always ready to play,” Connor said.

Club president Alexia Diablo has a positive outlook on how the club has played so far. “Our team has been doing really well lately; it looks a lot better than we did last year. We picked up a couple of girls that have been playing for a really long time,” Diablo said. “We look like we [are] working together really well this year.”

Diablo also thinks that as a team one of their goals is to have a better season than last year. “For our team, I would say that we definitely want to become more solid. We’re really trying to put our names out there this year,” Diablo said.

For club member Alex Gellhaus, she is enjoying her last year on the hockey club. Gellhaus also wants to have a better season this year. “We were .500 last year, so we won half the games we played. For this year, our goal is to have our best season yet, so we kind of would like to win the majority of the games,” Gellhaus said.

According to Gellhaus, winning games was not the primary objective in past seasons, but this year the team has a new attitude and a chance to win a lot more games.

During practices, Connor has his players work on a variety of strategies. He wants the team to score when the opportunity presents itself, but he also wants the team to be exceptional defensively. Connor has some more things that he would like to see the team try to achieve. “For the season [we] probably [need] to improve our skating [and] our stick-handling,” Connor said.

Connor states that, the club tries to start the season as early as possible. “We try and start fairly soon, like mid-September we start. We actually had our first game a couple weeks earlier this year,” Connor said.

He was impressed with how his team played in the first couple of games despite only practicing 3 to 4 times prior to playing. Connor would like his players to stay on the same page with each other for a successful season.