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The Warm Up: Beard
The Rams skated against an opponent Saturday night, 2/27/2021. Yes! The last time was on another Saturday, 2/6/2021. That’s three weeks due to quarantine. The plan was to return from quarantine with home and away games against Morristown on Friday and Saturday and then Mo-Town was quarantined to end their season. And so the Rams scrambled to get at least one warm up before the Mennen Cup, the only trophy for this season.
The state championship was not in the cards this year for any team, also due to covid.
Morristown-Beard agreed to replace Morristown for the Rams Saturday warm up. And so the Rams faced the team ranked 6th in New Jersey’s top 20 with a 7-1-1 record. During the Rams quarantine, Beard skated in 6 games winning them all with these scores: (6-1, 8-2, 7-2, 8-3, 6-0, 4-1).
And in addition to the quality of their opponent, the Rams were without their two top scorers, Zach Gallo and Ben Yurchuk. With that background, the Rams achieved their goal of getting an appropriate warm up and against the team who will face the winner of the opening game of the Mennen Cup: Randolph versus Morris Knolls on March 2nd to open the Mennen Cup.
The final will be on March 4th the winner against Beard.
Beard came out to start the game with non-stop pressure on the Rams goal until they scored their first goal two minutes in. The Rams started to get their legs moving and lucked out two minutes later when the post kept a hard slap shot by Beard out of Joe Yutsus’ goal.
Seven minutes in the Live Broadcaster commented: “Save by Joe Yutsus. Yutsus has been outstanding in the opening minutes. It’s a one to nothing game, but it could have been two or three to nothing. He has been keeping Randolph afloat so far.” The Rams held on and finished the period down one goal 1-0. The shots on goal tells the story: 12 shots for Beard, 4 for the Rams.
The second period was all Beard, which has been the story for most of Beards’ season. They scored three goals in the opening four minutes of the second and out shot the Rams 14 to 2 in the period.
In the third period, the Rams held their own until 4 minutes remaining when Cam Fernandez retrieved the puck in Beards zone, skated behind his goal and speed up the ice to the top of the Rams face off circle when a Rams defender got in his way. Fernandez fell to his left, but was able to take a slap shot over the right shoulder of Joe Yutsus hitting the cross bar and in. The final score was 5-0. Joe faced 39 shots on goal.
We wanted a warm up and we got one. Lots of ice time for the entire team.
Next game: Mennen Cup versus Morris Knolls – Hills on March 2nd at 6:15pm at Mennen Arena.
