Sunday, February 22, 2026
The Providence College Hockey Friars swept Vermont this weekend, beating the Catamounts by 5-2 and 5-3 scores in Burlington, Vt. With the wins, the Friars achieved wins #20 and #21 of this season, and Coach Nate Leaman recorded his 9th twenty-win season as the Friars coach.
The Friars remain in first place in Hockey East with 48 points. Boston College jumped into second place with 39 points after sweeping Connecticut this weekend.
In Friday night’s matchup, PC fell behind early as Vermont’s Colin Kessler lit the lamp for Vermont at 4:12 of the first period with a wrist shot from the slot. That goal woke up the Friars and they fought back with two goals in the first period, a power play goal by Jack Mustard at 9:04 and a beautiful short-handed goal by Will Eiger at 14:55 after Eiger intercepted an errant Vermont pass. Vermont lifted backup goalie Axel Mangbo at the end of the period after giving up 2 goals on 10 PC shots.
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The Friars carried the 2-1 lead into the second period and dominated play, scoring two goals on Vermont’s regular netminder Aiden Wright. Freshman Roger McQueen scored his 10th goal of the season to the right of Wright on a beautiful feed from Jonathan Fauchon from behind the net. Five minutes later PC’s grad transfer defenseman Kale McCallum extended PC’s lead to 4-1 lead with his 5th goal of the year. Vermont, however, made it a 2-goal game again only 14 seconds later when Sebastian Tornquist surprised PC goalie Parsons with a blistering blue line slap shot.
PC played solid defense in the third period as Vermont amped up their play putting 14 shots on Parsons with no additional goals. PC’s Tanner Adams scored his 2nd empty netter in as many games at 18:20 of the third period to close out PC’s scoring.
Vermont came out firing in Saturday night’s game, not playing like a 12-18 team, as they brought the play to the Friars. PC, however, had Vermont’s goalie Aiden Wright’s number. Wright faced only seven Friar shots in the first period, but PC scored 3 goals. Hudson Malinoski, who has been quiet of late, scored two goals, and John Mustard scored his team-leading 14th goal of the season. Vermont got one goal back at 17:14 of the second period with a goal from Dan Sambuco.
After Vermont’s second goal halfway through the second period lifted the Cats to a one-goal deficit, PC stormed back with two more goals. Malinoski achieved a hat trick with his third goal of the game at 12:10 and Roger McQueen got his second goal of the weekend on a PC power play at 19:48 to give PC a 5-2 lead at the end of two periods.
Vermont got its third goal of the game at 2:00 of the third period to close the score to 5-3 but could get no closer as Parsons shut the Catamounts out the rest of the way. Parsons finished the night with 24 saves.
The road wins in Burlington gave PC its 12th win in its last 13 road games and an overall 12-3-1 road record for the season, its best road record in several seasons. With the two wins this weekend, Parsons stats for the season now stand at 12-2-1, 2.09 goals against average, and a .920 save percentage.
Additional Slap Shots
— PC faces the University of New Hampshire next weekend in a home-and-home series with the Friday game at Schneider at 7 PM; Saturday’s game will be in Durham.
— PC’s last regular season game is Saturday, March 7th at Schneider against UConn. Puck drop is at 4 PM. PC beat the Huskies 4-1 at Storrs and tied 2-2 at Schneider in November games.
— Boston College beat UConn this past Saturday, 2-1, before 10,494 fans at the Hartford People’s Bank Arena, formerly the Hartford Civic Center, where UConn plays one or two home games a year. It was the largest Hockey East crowd of the season. I would love to see the Friars play one game a year at the AMP. Perhaps a double header with a PC-BC matchup and a Brown-Harvard matchup might draw a decent crowd. Before PC built Schneider Arena in 1973, many of the PC-BC games at the old RI Auditorium were sell-outs, drawing 5,500 fans per game. The present capacity of Schneider is 3,030.
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