The glory days of Monarch hockey may be behind it, but the Coyotes came one step closer to re-igniting the flame that carried the teams of old during the 2010s.
On Saturday night at the South Suburban Sports Complex, they saw their season come to an end with a 5-2 loss to top-seeded Regis Jesuit during the Frozen Four of the Class 5A state playoffs.
It was the first time the fourth-seeded Coyotes graced the semifinal ice since 2018, a year after they won the only state hockey championship in school history. The program enjoyed five straight trips to the title game from 2013 to 2017 before finally coming out on top.
The culture that head coach Jimmy Dexter — who earlier this year surpassed 200 wins — has spent years building bore fruit again with another strong, cohesive group.
“There isn’t a ton of talk about the older teams … but there’s knowledge of the culture we built around the MoHi lineage,” sophomore goalie Joshua Ringoen said. “It was definitely in our minds, I think, because we knew that a Monarch team hadn’t gone to the semifinals in a long time.”
No matter what they did against Regis, however, they could hardly outsmart the Raiders’ freshman netminder Easton Sparks, who ended his night with 33 saves. Ringoen, by comparison, stopped 25 shots. Still, Dexter was proud of the strides his boys took to get there.
“These guys are an unbelievable group of young men. I really love this group,” he said. “We have had more skilled teams, some of our teams. (Although) we won it in ’17, our ’16 team was probably the best team we ever had. We were undefeated all season. We did end up losing to Regis, but we were a much better team. It’s just sometimes you just need bounces to win a state championship.
“(Sparks) is a good little goaltender,” Dexter said. “We hit him a lot. We hit him in the head. The second period, I thought we had tons of scoring chances, and we just didn’t bury pucks.”
The Raiders asserted their power late in the first period, with Parker Brinner and Ian Beck sinking back-to-back goals in a span of five minutes, but they caught a hungry Coyotes team coming out into the second.
Then both teams really came to life.
Regis’ Harry Sorensen added to the Raiders’ lead with a smooth score at the 6:30 mark, setting off a series of events that eventually led to a breakaway goal from Monarch’s Ben Rosenberg 34 seconds later.
The two squads tapped into the energy that surged from those two goals, then used it to net two more — first on a shot from Regis’ Nolan Williams at the 1:59 mark, and then on a laser from Monarch’s Ryan Beals with 17 seconds remaining. Beals found an opening near the face-off spot, then rocketed the puck over the shoulder of Sparks and into the top corner of the net.
“It’s been a while since we picked it up like that,” Ringoen said. “We picked up the pace in the second period, and I thought they maybe had some lucky bounces on their goals. One of them, I don’t even know how that went in, and the other was just a pretty beautiful rebound and a pretty finish by them. They might have had some lucky bounces on the saving end to the defensive end.”
The Coyotes and Raiders maintained the status quo for almost the entire third period, until Williams hammered in one last nail with 66 seconds to go. The Coyotes ended their 2023-24 campaign with a 10-5-6 record.
The Raiders will travel across town to Magness Arena on Tuesday night to face off with either No. 2 Valor Christian or No. 3 Cherry Creek, who played their semifinal contest late Saturday.
The Coyotes, having completed their high school run, will now gear up for nationals in Westchester, Penn. at the end of the month.
“I think (this loss) will help us going into nationals and next year with our team, because we’ll remember how we feel right now and hopefully play better next time, not wasting the chance we got,” junior forward Jaren Ng said. “I’m really bummed to have lost the game but I’m proud of my team, that we made it where we did.”
