The Upper Montgomery Lightning hockey program is back on the ice and looking forward to the 2022 – 2023 high school hockey season. The team began student athlete evaluations earlier this month. While official team placements are not permitted to be announced until after the last evaluation session, or in early October, most of the varsity squad returns from last season. As has been the case for the past two seasons, the team is very young, only three seniors departed the program from last season, and the team has only five seniors on the roster of thirty-three student athletes for this upcoming season.
In next month’s October blog, we will break down the team and the outlook for the upcoming season. The coaching staff is already excited by the growth of the team. Another year older and another year stronger. It is evident from the evaluation sessions that the team has gotten faster and deeper from a talent standpoint. Just three years ago the program had only 13 student athletes participating. When the team is separated into Varsity and Junior Varsity in early October, the program will almost be able to field two distinctly separate teams. There will likely be only a handful of student athletes playing for both teams.
The Lightning program is gaining the respect of other teams in the Montgomery Hockey Conference. The team also has earned respect and appreciation for playing non-conference games against the top public and private high school programs in Maryland. In scheduling these additional games against top tier competition, the program hopes to have its student athletes receive more playing time and competing against competition that will make the team better when conference playoffs arrive at the end of the regular season. This was true last season. The Varsity played at Washington County and was outplayed. But, that experience prepared the team for its two playoff games against Richard Montgomery and Wootton. Both games were very competitive until the final minutes of each game.
The Junior Varsity played a game non-conference game against Landon. The private school junior varsity teams are equivalent to some of the lower end varsity programs in the Montgomery Hockey Conference. Even though the junior varsity lost badly, that experience propelled the team forward and into a six game winning streak to finish the season and become Upper Montgomery’s first championship team.