NEVILLE TWP., Pa — Senior forward Shawn Cameron and goaltender Loagn Drackett both brought their game on Friday night and their contributions played a large part in the Rochester Institute of Technology Tigers’ 4-1 victory over the Robert Morris Colonials.
As has been the case for much of the second half of the season, the score didn’t completely tell the tale of the contest a the Colonials threw 42 pieces of vulcanized rubber at Drackett and company on the night.
However, the goal finishing element that has been missing from the Colonial recipe in recent weeks continued to be problematic as only Nick Jenny’s power play tally in the third period wound up on the score sheet when the final buzzer sounded.
“Not good enough,” head coach Derek Schooley said. “You know you fix one thing and another thing is leaking. Tonight, it was we fixed the special teams and our five-on-five play wasn’t good enough.”
Cameron got the Tigers rolling almost instantly when he threw a rebound past Justin Kapelmaster just 4:35 into the game. Cameron doubled the Tigers’ lead at 15:01 of the second frame when he scored on a feed from Nick Bruce.
Jenny sliced the advtange with his goal just 32 seconds into the third period but a quick response from Ryan Nicholson just over two minutes later seemed to take the life out of the Colonials’ comeback.
In between the goals, Robert Morris looked to be just one or two nearly missed shots from making it a completely different game but could not find a way past Drackett who frustrated his opponent throughout sixty minutes of play.
“We don’t score enough.” Schooley said. “We get the chances but we just don’t score. It’s not good enough to say, ‘hey look, we got all these shots,’ but we’ve got to convert and we’ve got to finish and we’re not finishing enough.”
Aiden Dupuis added a fourth RIT tally at 7:16, taking a feed from Cameron in the process and dashing the Colonial hopes of a comeback for good. It was a disappointing and frustrating night for Robert Morris overall who will need a more determined effort when the two teams meet once again to finish the two game series.
“We got pushed around a bit in our own building,” Schooley added. “We’ve got to have some pride and be more determined tomorrow. We’ve got to fix it all because we’re coming down to our last seven games. We talk like we’ve got belief but we’ve got to go out and do it. It’s easy to say that we’ve got belief, until you go out and do it it’s just words and you’ve got to make sure you back up your words.”
The two teams finish their weekend set on Saturday night at RMU Island Sports Center with faceoff scheduled for 7:05 p.m.
