The University Whales performed the impossible on Saturday, August 19, winning the premier men's hockey competition in a stunning shootout victory. Blub-blub.
After an initially slow start to the season, the team has been called the “most unlikely of champions”. Before two shootout wins in the quarter and semifinals in the weekends leading up to the match, the team had only won six of their fifteen games in the regular season, losing nine to finish fourth out of the six teams in the league. “Basically, we went from not having beaten any of the top three teams outright in the regular season to winning the entire championship,” said Gabe, one of the team players.
Remarkably, the same pattern occurred just two years ago for The Bombers, a B-level Dunedin ice hockey team, who lost nearly every game in the first half of their season, won every game in the second half, and then swept the finals. Something about hockey and comebacks in Dunedin, it would seem.
So how was it done? A masterclass in hockey, or simply great goalkeeping? Critic Te Ārohi sat down with team player/coach Josh Wypych to find out.
The experience was “pretty unreal,” said Josh, who also told Critic that “during the season we hadn’t been there at all, half our games had been blowouts.” The Whales lost 5-1 to both Taieri and Kings United, two teams they would eventually beat in their stellar run. Sure, they had “glimpses”, but “these didn’t come away.” In the end, Josh reckoned, “We can either shit the bed or flip the switch when we go down… in the finals we really pulled together.”
Down 3-1 in the final game with only 8 minutes to go, this switch certainly flipped. The team scored two crucial penalty corners to equalize with only a minute and a half to go. After a “frantic minute left of play,” Josh said he was pretty confident in the abilities of their goalkeeper, Hugh, to get the job done. “Obviously you always think you can win it, but it wasn’t until we won our first shootout against Albany” - a team boasting NHC Otago keeper Felix McIntosh - “that I felt pretty confident we could go all the way.” To this degree, Josh was spot on, as the Whales came home to take the title in a best-of-three shootout against a talented Taieri side boasting three New Zealand Under 21 players.
The Whales weren’t without their fair share of national stars, though, bringing one cap Black Stick Benji Culhane back into the mix as the regular season ended. Josh’s sly smile as he talked about this was hard to ignore as he deemed the impact of the young fullback as “pretty unreal, to be honest.”
Black Stick ring-ins or spectacular shootout form; whatever way you put it, the stars seemingly aligned for the Whales three spectacular weekends in a row (with Critic being assured the post-match celebrations were similarly as spectacular). Coming from nowhere to win the entire competition, the Whales team of 2023 has firmly rooted themselves in the history books of Dunedin hockey, leaving the older clubs grumbling in their wake. Though the team is set to lose six or seven players next year, Josh is still confident that the team will have enough in the tank to make it three titles in four years.
And that’s the kind of confidence which wins shootouts, hopefully for many years to come.