If someone told Josh Zizek back in 2016 when he first came to Oswego State as a freshman on the men’s hockey team that he would be replacing Chris Raguseo as the team captain three years later, he would have told them “absolutely not.”
Or even if that same person told Jody Sullivan he would be wearing an ‘A’ on his jersey as an assistant captain his senior year, replacing the likes of Kenny Neil, he probably would have laughed it off.
But now as seniors, Zizek and Sullivan both sit at the end of the locker room with letters on their shoulders, leading the 2019-2020 Oswego State Lakers.
“It even goes beyond Raguseo. It’s taking after guys like Devin Campbell or Mitch Herlihey who wore it,” Zizek said. “To be in the same category as those guys, it’s an awesome feeling. It’s truly an honor.”
This year’s senior class, which has 13 players, has had to deal with a lot of adversity, assistant coach Jon Whitelaw said.
When Whitelaw was playing for the Lakers, from 2009-2013, Oswego State won three SUNYAC titles and made it to the NCAA Frozen Four every year, falling in the championship game twice. The Lakers had a combined 98-12-12 record over those four seasons.
Compare that to this year’s senior class, which, so far, has a 71-28-6 record heading into the last weekend of the regular season. These 13 seniors have not won a SUNYAC title in their first three years and have only made it as far as the NCAA Div. III first round twice, in 2017 and 2019.
“This season has been a challenging one in terms of what our record shows,” Whitelaw said. “It’s telling of how close they are and what kind of group they are.”
The type of leadership this group has is thanks to that senior class from 2017. Not only were they successful on the ice, but they had a sense of leadership that led younger players to work harder. Whitelaw even said with players like Neil, Shawn Hulshof and Matt Galati leading the program that year, “you can see it in the way some of our seniors lead this year.”
Four players from the 12-person class had 100-point careers. Hulshof had 130 points, Alex Botten and Galati had 118 points each, while Neil finished his career with 123. That class of 2017 had such a special bond that, “as soon as we got here, you could tell how close they were,” Sullivan said. He also mentioned it was “the decisions they made both on and off the ice,” that made them the great leaders they were.
That senior class had a lot of different personalities, which made them fan-favorites both within the Oswego community and fun to cover in terms of media, according to Cole Parzych who was the beat writer for the team during the 2016-2017 season for The Oswegonian. He mentioned that he could see connections between Neil and Zizek, just the way both players kept things light and enjoyed the game of hockey.
“Raguseo was smart, always held himself accountable and had high standards for himself,” Parzych said. “That was my favorite class to cover, though. All those guys, all four years, it all just came together that season.”
But if nothing else, that senior class instilled the culture of Oswego State, so “as freshmen, we got the idea of what Oswego was right away,” Mitch Emerson, also a four-year player, said.
“Guys like Raguseo, they lived and breathed for Oswego. You can just tell how much they wanted to win every night,” Emerson said. “Just playing behind them, once you see the top guys going as hard as they are every single day, it becomes contagious.”
But the 2016-2017 season did not have some of the same challenges that this year’s roster has faced. Oswego State finished with a 21-6-1 overall record, going 13-2-1 in the SUNYAC. The team won the annual Oswego State Hockey Classic. For the SUNYACs, Oswego State clinched home-ice advantage as the No. 1 seed in the league, though fell to then-No. 2 Plattsburgh State in the championship. The Lakers did not make it past the first round of the NCAA Tournament, falling in the first round to Hamilton College.
And for the last three seasons, the seniors have “been blessed with some pretty good teams,” Emerson said. This year, Oswego State enters the last regular-season weekend with a 13-9-1 overall record, not even nationally-ranked.
After the 3-2 overtime loss to SUNY Cortland on Jan. 24, head coach Ed Gosek mentioned that the players are now taking ownership of the team with the captains and seniors leading the charge. Zizek added “everybody is coming to the rink with smiles on their face,” and Sullivan said “with a 13-senior class, you can see leaders emerging from everyone.”
“If you look at the last couple weeks, our team is finally playing some actual hockey,” Zizek said. “Once [Gosek] gave us some leeway, everything started to turn around.”
This adversity has also pushed another thing: sticking together as a team.
“This senior group has maybe been through a little bit more than other groups in terms of different things [that] have occurred off the ice,” Whitelaw said. “At no point have they folded, crumbled or pointed fingers at each other. They’ve certainly stuck together through it all.”
As the senior class’s time comes to an end, with two regular-season games left and then the playoffs, where it is win or go home, it is time for the 2020 seniors to make their own legacy.
“For this group, with everything they’ve done within the community for our school, a lot of their achievements have come off the ice,” Whitelaw said. “When the freshmen come in next year and they’re asking about Zizek or [Michael] Gillespie or any of the guys that are graduating, it’s always going to come back to that they were good guys, good teammates and in it for the right reason and competed every single day.”
For the seniors, they are still writing what that legacy will be. While winning would be nice and is the team’s number one goal, “one of the greatest compliments somebody can say about you is kind things and how good of a person you were off the ice,” Zizek added.
“We’ve got some time left. We can still have some fun and make a run,” Zizek said. “It’s not over and we have so much left to give.”
Photo by Nicole Hube | The Oswegonian
