Falcons Play Hard, But Can't Top West Haven

After experiencing the roughest stretch of coach Frank Genovese's tenure, things appeared even more bleak for the Fermi High School hockey team heading into Saturday's action.

The Falcons had experienced back-to-back blowouts earlier in the week, and entered the Enfield Twin Rinks Saturday faced with the task of hosting West Haven, ranked fourth in the state. To make matters worse, Fermi would be without the services of injured top defenseman Shaun Kellam.

On paper, it appeared to be a total mismatch, but hockey games are not played on paper. The gritty Falcons skated hard and fired 29 shots at Blue Devils goaltender J.P. Withington, but a three-goal burst midway through the contest enabled West Haven to post a 6-1 victory.

"I liked our resolve," Genovese said. "At this point in the season, it's easy to pack it in, but to our credit, we threw up almost 30 shots at a really good team."

As hard as Fermi played, they were powerless to stop Blue Devils forward Mike Troiano, who netted three goals. Kyle Leyerzapf added two for the winners.

Troiano jump-started the West Haven offense by beating Fermi goalie Brandon Carey just 54 seconds after the opening faceoff. He nearly added a second goal later in the period, but his blistering shot ricocheted off the goalpost.

Ryan Guhne had a partial breakaway in the final 10 seconds of the period for the Falcons, but his shot barely missed the net.

Troiano met metal again early in the second period, banging a shot off the crossbar. Moments later, however, he recorded a power play goal to put the Blue Devils up by two.

The key point of the game came midway through the second period. Fermi had a 5-on-3 advantage and put considerable pressure on Withington, but came away empty. Moments after the power play ended, Leyerzapf scored his first goal to provide West Haven a 3-0 margin.

"On that power play, we had pressure, we had good looks and we were finding open guys," Genovese said.

Ryan Hansen scored West Haven's fourth goal at 10:47 of the middle period, then Troiano completed his hat trick less than a minute and a half later to create a 5-0 Blue Devils lead at the second intermission.

Fermi refused to quit, and came out flying in the third period. Joey Rush scored an unassisted goal at 4:14, deflecting a shot off a West Haven defender.

Leyerzapf completed the scoring with his second goal with 6:15 to play. West Haven had exactly 13 shots on goal in each of the three periods.

Fermi (3-11-1) travels to Trinity College Tuesday to take on Wethersfield at 8:30 p.m. West Haven (8-4-2) is off for a week until hosting perennial rival Hamden next Saturday.