Newtown High Hockey Team Looks To Get Back To Winning Ways

By Andy Hutchison

After winning three of four games, Newtown High School’s hockey team dropped three straight contests to fall to 3-5 heading into the middle of this week. The Nighthawks, however, hope to build off some positive signs from the latter of that trio of setbacks, a 2-1 overtime defeat to the Newington-Berlin cooperative team this past Monday.

The Nighthawks traveled to Newington to play a make-up of the originally snowed-out contest and fought back late in the third period to force overtime. Following a timeout, Newtown evened the score when Christian Beitel found the net (the goal was assisted by Josh Branchflower and Mike Poeltl — the latter of whom was named an assistant captain during the weekend — with about a minute and a half remaining. Newtown fell short in its first OT situation of the season, but showed resiliency and might have won if the team caught a few breaks, including when a Branchflower shot hit the post.

Newtown Coach Paul Esposito would like to see his skaters play the body more and create turnovers in the neutral zone, but the coach was mostly pleased with the start-to-finish effort. That’s something the Hawks have been searching for throughout much of the early season.

Strong late-game play is not out of the ordinary for the Nighthawks. The best example of this is when they started slowly, fell behind 3-1 and scored six goals in the third period of a 7-3 win over Bolton-Coventry-Lyman Memorial earlier in the year. Newtown made another late-game push only to fall short in a 5-2 loss to the Hall-Southington co-op at Danbury Ice Arena this past Saturday.

Newtown fell behind 2-0 after one period and eventually trailed 3-0 before a pair of unassisted Beitel tallies got the Hawks to within a goal at 3-2 in the third period.

“We really wanted to jump on them in the first period and we didn’t,” Esposito said following that game.

The Nighthawks apparently caught a bad break on the second goal of the game when a shot that seemed to hit the crossbar was credited as a goal for Hall-Southington. Newtown goaltender Mitch Bloomberg, who stopped 36 shots in an impressive effort, and Esposito both said the shot clearly did not go in. That may have taken some of the air out of the Nighthawks, but the coach believes his players are capable of coming out stronger as they did against Newington-Berlin on a regular basis.

“They need to have that sense of urgency in the beginning of the game,” Esposito said of his players.

“That’s something we have to continue to work on,” said Beitel, adding that the chemistry and talent are in place.

Newtown was outshot 41-20 by game’s end as Hall-Southington improved to 9-1.

The special teams numbers from this game are a double-edged sword. Newtown was penalized only three times (“We’ve been focusing on not taking penalties,” Esposito said), but despite seven power plays, the Hawks could not take advantage of the man advantage.

Despite the recent struggles, the team still has high hopes of getting back to the postseason.

“I think we have a lot of potential. We have a lot of good players,” said freshman Ted Benoit, one of the team’s many solid young new additions this winter. “I think we can make the playoffs.”

“There’s no doubt we’re going to the state playoffs,” Bloomberg added confidently. “I think we can go pretty deep.”

The Nighthawks looked to take their first step toward getting back on the winning track this past Wednesday in a game against the Brookfield-Bethel-Danbury team (after The Bee sports section went to press). On Saturday, Newtown is scheduled to take on Masuk in another key South-West Conference tilt.