By Jim Rueda
Free Press Sports Editor
MANKATO — Mankato West sophomore Landon Brown may be in his first year of varsity hockey, but he’s played the game long enough to know that if you hang around the opponent’s net, good things are going to happen.
Brown did exactly that on Tuesday, scoring three goals all within 10 feet of the Mankato East/Loyola net, to lead his team to a 4-1 Big Nine Conference win at All Seasons Arena. It was the first hat trick of Brown’s high school career.
“It doesn’t get a whole lot better than (scoring three goals) against East,” Brown said afterward. “We’ve been taught all the way through youth hockey that you take shots, crash the net and look for rebounds. Two of my goals came on rebounds tonight and the other was a nice pass from Tyler (Resner).”
West coach Curtis Doell says Brown, who stands 6-3 and weighs nearly 200 pounds, is tough to move from the front of the net.
“He’s a big guy and it takes some work by the defensemen to get him out of there,” Doell said. “He just kept hanging around, looking for opportunities and made the most of them.”
Tuesday’s first period was up-tempo on the part of both teams but without a lot of focus. Brown had the only goal at 15:29 when a rebound off a Billy Bigham shot dropped in front and he swatted it in.
Things settled down in the second and third frames with both clubs making more deliberate passes and playing better position.
Brown made it 2-0 in the second, popping in another rebound off a Nate Olsen shot. With less than a minute to go in the period, East/Loyola got on the board when Taylor Ries stuffed a shot past goalie Jake Kaufman to close the gap to 2-1.
“That was a momentum changer,” East/Loyola coach Aaron Anderson said afterward. “That got us back in the game, but then we took some penalties early in the third and things swung the other way. West had a 5-on-3 power play which they ended up scoring a goal on and that hurt us.”
The power-play score was delivered by Matt Campbell and resulted in the 100th point of his career. Brown capped the scoring at the 10:53 mark, taking a perfect feed across the crease from Resner and slipping it into the open net.
When it was over, West had outshot the Cougars 33-15. Lucas Weihe made 29 saves in the losing effort.
Kaufman stopped 14 shots to get the win. Doell said the junior goalie has been a pleasant surprise this year.
“He played only two varsity games last year and now he’s played every game for us this year and he’d done extremely well,” Doell said. “He’s really stepped up. We couldn’t have asked for anything more out of him.”
Olsen finished with two assists for West. Dan Billiar and Zach Hermer had assists for East/Loyola.
