Cyclone Hockey riding longest win streak at home in more than four years

Will Musgrove

The night of Nov. 9, 2013, was the last time the Cyclone Hockey team skated off the ice at the Ames/ISU Ice Arena with a loss.

Since then, the No. 9 Cyclones (31-8-3, 14-5-1 CSCHL) have won 11 consecutive games at home — the longest run in more than four years. During this stretch, Iowa State tallied six wins against teams ranked in the top 20 in the American Collegiate Hockey Association.

With only four games left at home for the Cyclones this season, forward Mark Huber doesn’t think this streak will end anytime soon.

“I have no doubt in my mind that we can sweep at home for the rest of the year,” Huber said. “I don’t want to put a guarantee on it because you can’t guarantee wins. But it is our goal to win all four games we have left at home.”

The Cyclones are 19-2 overall playing in Ames this season. Their last four games in front of a friendly crowd will be with Central Oklahoma and the Edina Lakers.

Goalie Scott Ismond credits part of this success to the support of the fans and the luxuries of playing at home. But the changes that ISU coach Jason Fairman brought to the program after taking over as head coach for the retiring Al Murdoch seems to be the deciding factor.

“It made everyone buy into the system again,” Ismond said about Fairman taking the reins of the Cyclone hockey team. “In the past you’d see guys starting to get burnt out at this time of the year. They have a new mental frame of mind going into this now. That is the biggest change he has brought in. It is just change itself.”

Even when the Cyclones are on the road, they like to take a piece of Iowa State with them to make every ice arena feel a little bit like home.

“This year we take two mats with the Iowa State logo on it and put them in our dressing rooms,” Ismond said. “They are little mats, and we just take to the dressing rooms that we are visiting. It may seem like a tiny thing, but it gives us a bit more of that structure we are used to coming out of the Ames/ISU Ice Arena.”

If the Cyclones are going to keep the winning streak alive in Ames, Fairman said the team will need to be ready to adapt on the ice.

“We have to keep doing what we are doing,” Fairman said. “We come out a little bit flat sometimes, but we are just going to have to make adjustments from a coaching standpoint.”