Faribault Girls Hockey Opens Season Tuesday

The Faribault Falcon girls hockey team opens their conference season Tuesday night at Rochester Mayo and the game will be broadcast on KDHL Radio 920 AM.

It can also be heard at www.kdhlradio.com or by downloading the FREE Radio Pup app on your favorite mobile device.

The Falcons and Owatonna are the only Big Nine girls hockey teams not to have a conference game yet and Mayo has already had three conference games.

Owatonna hosts Rochester Century 7:00 p.m. tonight.  The other Big Nine Conference games are John Marshall/Lourdes at Northfield at 7:30 p.m. and Mankato West playing Mankato East at 7:00 p.m..

The Spartans are 1-2 and are coming off a 7-0 loss to Red Wing last Saturday in Rochester.  Winger Taylor Heise had 4 goals in that game and is leading the state in scoring at this point in the season.

Faribault is 0-2 with losses to New Ulm 7-4 and New Prague 5-2.

All-Conference Honorable Mention goalie Camryn Salmonsen is back after posting a 11-12-1 record last season.  She played every game in net and recorded no shutouts with a goal against average of 3.62 and .888 save percentage.

Opponents averaged 31 shots a night against Faribault last season while the Falcons collected an average of 25.

The Falcon power play was an impressive 27.9% but their penalty kill had issues at 72.1%.

Faribault was one of seven teams in the twelve team Big Nine Conference with a winning league record at 10-6-1.

Mayo finished last season 10-6 in the league and had the same number of points as Faribault with 28.  The Spartans were 14-10 overall.

The Falcons are very young with two seniors on this year's team.  Salmonsen and Allyson McCoshen.

McCoshen received the Falcon award last year.  All-Conference Honorable Mention Olivia Williamson is the leading goal scorer back with 13 goals and 14 assists as a freshman last season.

McCoshen had 10 goals and 14 assists and sophomore Haley Lang had 11 goals and 11 assists.

Junior Ellie Knutson tallied 7 goals and 7 assists.

Scoring should not be an issue but getting some help for Salmonsen in the defensive zone could be as evidenced by the 12 goals in their first two games.

The Falcons have inexperience at the defense positions with the only really experienced defense person back being junior Olivia Morelan.

Otherwise the roster lists three sophomores and a seventh grader as defense players.

Head Coach Alli Miller is assisted again this year by Erin Kastner and Kailen Aspelund and they've done a terrific job getting as much out of their players as possible.

Miller has 14 players on the roster to work with and by comparison tonight's opponent Rochester Mayo has 27 players on their roster.

The Spartans have 10 seniors on their varsity.

Head Coach Mike McCormack has four assistant coaches.

Tonight's game has been moved back to a 7:45 p.m. drop of the puck which means we will hit the airwaves at about 7:30 tonight from Graham Arena rink one.