For the young Grand Valley State University women’s club hockey team, taking the season one game at a time has proven difficult at times, but after struggling last weekend, the team will look to focus in the rest of the year.

“It has been a good early season, especially with how young our team is,” said GVSU head coach Cory Whitaker, now in his fifth year of coaching for the Lakers. “They’ve done a good job of coming together as a team and implementing all the things that we’ve been throwing at them over the last two months.”

However, the Lakers (8-4-2) agree that the teams that they have faced thus far have not been particularly challenging, and when facing more aggressive competitors, the team found themselves somewhat out of their element.

“The problem that that creates is that you begin to fall into a rut of either overconfidence or a lack of performance because of the ability to usually win fairly easily,” Whitaker said. “When we did get a chance to face off against the best-of-the-best, we did not fare as well as I would have liked.”

This pattern became clear last weekend when the Lakers found themselves facing off against major competitors Ohio State University, Colorado State University, Michigan State University and the University of Rhode Island.

While the team successfully combated the Buckeyes, winning 7-1, the Lakers fell to the other three schools, losing 1-0, 4-0 and 4-2, respectively.

“This last weekend wasn’t our best, but that’s what happens when we get into tournament play with so many new faces,” said defender Meghan Jahn, a senior. “A lot of it was our mentality going into the games. I think we were a little overconfident, and that didn’t turn out in our favor.”

Despite their overconfidence, the team has acknowledged their deficiencies and aim at improving those areas as the season continues to progress.

“I think that we took our early wins for granted and got a little ahead of ourselves,” said forward Sam Dame, a freshman. “We need improve our consistency.”

Now that the Lakers are aware of the problem, they are committed to evolving as a team and working on improving their individual play.

This will be essential for the team in their upcoming Thursday night game against the Division I Liberty University (10-1).

“We are really looking to improve our consistency and find our inner drive,” coach Whitaker said. “I think that those are the things that we have to get better at if we honestly want to continue to compete against the best-of-the-best and not have the kind of mental lapses that we have had during the past couple of games.”

The Lakers remain optimistic, knowing that the difference between a winning and losing game boils down to teamwork and the amount of hard work put in during practice.

“Coming off of a weekend where we lost a few, hopefully we can respond well to the competition,” Jahn said. “Liberty is going to be the team to beat, and I think that everyone should be able to get pumped up in order to play our best against them.”

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