Icecats skating for redemption

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Members of the No. 5-ranked UA Icecats look on during a game last season. The team faces off with Towson State tonight and tomorrow night at 7:30 at the Tucson Convention Center.

Team captain Todd Buchler, who has 31 goals and 60 total points through the first half of this season, leads Towson State, a small school located in Towson, Md. Tigers head coach Marshall Stevenson turned this state college into an American Collegiate Hockey Association powerhouse in the brief 10 years hockey has been played there, posting a 211-81-16 record since the 1988-89 season.

Tigers winger Dan Callahan is a another threat, posting 25 goals and 18 assists so far this season. The combination of Callahan and Buchler will test the Icecats' defense, which gave up nine goals last weekend en route to an Icers' sweep.

The Icecats are led by sophomore wing Paul Dorn and center Marc Harris, who lead the team in scoring with 38 and 34 points, respectively, halfway through the 98-99 season. Junior goalie Mark Meister hopes to put a poor goaltending effort last weekend behind him as he tries to bring his once-microscopic goals allowed average back to earth from its current 3.19.

"When we play good teams we cannot afford to make catastrophic defensive errors," Icecats head coach Leo Golembiewski said. "We need to be very careful this weekend."

Despite the sweep, the Icecats remain a part of the hunt for the ACHA national championship, a title which Golembiewski has achieved once in the 20 years of Icecat hockey in 1985.

"We have a very, very good team," he said. "We led at the end of the first period in each Penn State game, we just made mistakes."