By BRANDEN MELLO

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The Coventry High hockey team is going to go through a lot of growing pains this season in Division II considering they only have five upperclassmen on the team. Last week, battling the two teams who made it to the D-II finals last week, the Oakers suffered a pair of losses to start the season 0-2.

Friday night, St. Ray’s defeated the Oakers 4-1 with freshman Connor DiPetro scoring the team’s lone goal. The Saints held a 3-1 lead late in the game when they added an empty netter to improve their goal differential.

One night later, the Oakers were beaten by a stronger, older Cumberland team looking to repeat as Division II champions. Cumberland’s Mike Kinch scored two goals and added an assist in the win, while Coventry freshman defenseman Alex Zannella scored the first goal of his career.

“We’re playing just five upperclassmen and the other teams are playing with double-digit upperclassmen,” Coventry head coach Ken Bird said. “Our stronger players are our younger players. The bright side of the weekend was both of our goalies played strong. They both played and they did well.”

Friday night, Spencer Patti earned the start against St. Raphael and played well, while Mitchell Beck had the unenviable task of facing Cumberland Saturday night. Beck gave up a goal on the first shot he saw, but he settled down in the third period and only allowed one goal despite facing 20 shots. In the game, the Oakers were out-shot 42-14.

Tonight, when the Oakers play their first home game of the season against Cumberland at the West Warwick Civic Center, Patti will get a chance to face the Clippers.

“I’m going to start Spencer (tonight), the same as I did last week,” Bird said. “It will let both of my goalies see different teams, too. Mitch saw Cumberland already so Spencer will start (tonight) and Mitch will start Saturday night.”

Irregardless of the age difference, Bird saw some holes in his team last weekend that he attempted to fix during practice this weekend. In both games, the Oakers struggled to move the puck out of their zone which led to easy chances for the opposition.

Bird hopes he fixed the problem by moving junior captain Ryan Galvin back to defense along with freshman playmaker P.J. Stringfellow.

“We’re moving P.J. Stringfellow back there as well, how long that will last, I don’t know,” Bird said. “We know there was a big problem back there and that’s one of the reason we were giving up so many shots. We just had trouble breaking out of our zone. We made some adjustments so we’ll see how that works.”

Offensively, the Oaker struggled putting together a power play. Coventry had 16 power-play opportunities against the Saints and the Clippers and they didn’t score a goal and they gave up two.  

Considering Bird would like to see his team score 25 percent of the time on the power play, last week’s performance wasn’t good enough if the Oakers are entertaining the thought of making the playoffs.

“We are trying to stay positive because we have such a young team, but one big negative last weekend was our power play,” Bird said. “They scored twice and we didn’t score once. That’s a big area, if we are efficient on the power play that would have closed the gap in those two games and made them close games right to the end.

“Instead of having juniors and seniors on the power play shooting the puck, we have freshmen and sophomores out there. It takes a little while to adapt to high-school hockey.”

After tonight’s game against Cumberland, the Oakers will make the trip down to the University of Rhode Island Saturday night to take on Division II newcomer South Kingstown at Brad Boss Arena. The Rebels were beaten 9-0 by Portsmouth in both teams’ season opener. 

“We have a very young team so we’re just trying to figure out where to put everybody to make our team as strong as possible,” Bird said.