On Saturday, bright and early, the Peconic Wildcats’ under-10 ice hockey team, coached by Jason Craig, took the ice at Doug and Kathryn De Groot’s Buckskill Winter Club, and took it to the UpIsland Police Athletic League Silver Knights, a club that had beaten the Wildcats handily twice last season. Never trailing, the Wildcats wound up winners by a score of 7-5.
That 7 a.m. game was the first home appearance this season of a Peconic Hockey Association team, one of half a dozen squads whose players range in age from 8 through 16, and it immensely pleased the hometown crowd. The young Wildcats went into the nonleague contest at 7-0 league-wise.
James Petrocelli got it going five minutes into the fray, and less than two minutes later, after the UpIslanders had evened the count, Hunter Harrington, the grandson of One Stop Market’s Bill Hall, and the Wildcats’ chief defenseman, netted a slapshot for 2-1. The home team led 3-1 after the first period, and 5-3 going into the third. The Knights pulled to within 5-4 about three minutes into the final period, but Grady Craig’s backhander upped the margin to 2 with 5:10 left on the clock, and Laird de Vera made it 7-4 with a little more than two minutes remaining, effectively putting the game away.
Billy Madden and Gabe Sarocky shared the goaltending duties, Billy being the younger of the two. The roster, Chris Minardi said, is rounded out by Cam Minardi, Luka Pisano, Anthony Cappiello, Evan Goldstein, Brody Hart, Mateo Vegara, Jake Rocco, Stefano McCourt, and Phoenix Utsch. Craig and Minardi are the leading scorers.
Asked for a list of the under-10s’ victims in recent weeks, the elder Minardi said, “We’ve beaten the Great Neck Tigers twice, the Freeport Enforcers, the Dix Hills Hawks, and the Brooklyn Aviators. We beat the Tigers and the Enforcers by a lot, but the games with the Hawks and Aviators were close. We’re the second-best Tier 3 Long Island Hockey Association team, behind the Rinx Metro. We had them beat in a tournament in New Jersey, but they came back to win by 1. I think the next time we face them we can beat them.”
“We look like a hockey team now,” Chris Minardi said, adding that “we’re trying to grow the sport, and the De Groots — they’ve got a four-ton compressor now, twice as big as the one they used to have — have been very helpful when it comes to that.”
Regarding a bubble that’s to enclose a regulation-size rink in Calverton, it’s “still in the approval process,” Minardi said. “That probably won’t be available until next season.”
Meanwhile, “there will be two Peconic Hockey Association games at Buckskill every Saturday and Sunday through February.”
