The 2024-25 Prep Team celebrates its third consecutive championship at South Kent. Photo provided.
The boys’ Prep hockey team recently headed to South Kent School in South Kent, Connecticut, to defend their back-to-back-to-back championships in South Kent’s annual tournament. The layout for this tournament is that there are 4 teams, and each team plays 3 games. The team with the best record at the end of the weekend claims the championship.
Last year, the Prep team swept through the tournament, beating the New Jersey Rockets, South Kent Selects, and Upper Canada College. This year, the boys’ team played the same teams but unfortunately had a different outcome.
Northwood played the 8th-ranked New Jersey Rockets in their first game. This game was quite a battle. After the first two periods, Northwood dominated and took a 2-1 lead in the third. However, the Rockets battled back and scored a late goal to tie the game 2-2. The game would head into overtime, where Northwood would dominate again, but neither team came out on top. The game went to a shootout, where the Rockets ended up winning after what seemed like an endless shootout.
In Northwood’s second game, the Huskies took on 12th-ranked South Kent. The Huskies, being hungry from their prior loss, were looking for a victory. However, the game was hard-fought from start to finish. South Kent took a 1-0 lead early in the game, and the game stayed 1-0 until late in the third period. Senior forward Max Stracar made a no-look backhanded pass to his linemate, Peter Amigh; Peter took a one-timer and slid it right past the goalie’s pad to tie the game 1-1. Regulation ended, and that meant another overtime for Northwood. The Huskies made sure they would take this one; in overtime, senior forward Charles Pigeon found, once again, Peter Amigh. Peter made no mistake in this opportunity and put the puck right under the crossbar for the Northwood victory.
In the Huskies’ third and final game, they needed to win in regulation to have a chance at winning the tournament. If the Rockets lost to South Kent and Northwood won, the Huskies would win the tournament. The Huskies took on a familiar opponent in their final game: Upper Canada College. This game was not the Huskies’ strongest showing, and they lost to Upper Canada College 4-2 with an empty net goal at the end of the game.
When asked about the weekend, Captain Parker Thompson ‘26 said, “We played the first two games hard. We should have come out on top against the Rockets, but it is what it is. We had a nice bounce-back game, taking down South Kent, but it sucks that we could not continue that momentum into the final game. This game was big, and we were just too confident against an opponent we had already beaten before. Something we can learn from in the future and prevent from happening as we get deeper into the season.”
