The Iowa State Hockey team has high hopes coming into the 2009-2010 season.

“We want to be in the National Championship; we want to be in the Final Four and we want to bring the big trophy,” said head coach Al Murdoch.

The Cyclones were solid last season but fell short of the yearly goal to win a championship. This season could be different though. The team brings a lot of experience as the team only graduated two seniors. Iowa State will have six seniors on its roster, which is exactly why Murdoch has high hopes.

“We have good talent coming back and we had a good recruiting year,” Murdoch said. “In all we have eight new recruits.”

One of those eight is freshman David Jensen. Jensen has plenty of hockey background in his family as his father played for the 1984 United States Olympic Hockey Team. Murdoch said he tries to keep that out of David’s head to keep him focused.

This season, the Cyclones will look to senior captain Brent Cornelius for leadership.  Last season Cornelius participated in the World University Games. Another player to keep an eye on is sophomore Brody Toigo, who was selected to the All-ACHA Rookie Team. This is important because there are only 55 teams in Division 1 and they only select one team.

The Cyclones plan on being a very physical team this season like many of their past seasons.

“Every defensive pair has to have one guy that’s going to be very, very physical,” Murdoch said.  “While the one is physical, I want the other to be offensive minded.”

Murdoch also mentioned that in any given game, the Cyclones will have 12 different guys out on the ice, six to score and six to be very physical.

This past week the team has been holding tryouts and just had the annual intersquad game Wednesday night. The team is now down to 40 players, which will be split up on to two teams, D-1 and D-3.

The start of the hockey season officially begins Friday night as the Cyclones play host to Big 12 Conference rival Missouri with another game against them on Saturday.

“Missouri is one of the better teams in the Big 12 and has given us challenges in the last couple years,” Murdoch said. “Missouri loves to play here because it is the season opener for them and they really feed off of the energy from the Ames Arena.”

Murdoch said that it is very important to play well against Big 12 teams because they are the teams Iowa State sees the most.

“Of course I want to start out with two wins, but you have to take it one game at a time.”