March 30, 1992
To Unionville coach Mac McGarry, facing Monsignor Bonner in Thursday night’s semifinal of the Flyers Cup Championship was like trying to run from an oncoming tidal wave. “Every line of theirs looked the same, all pressure, all giving 100 percent, and you couldn’t tell the difference from one line to the next,” McGarry said. Unionville never got out of the way of the wave, as Bonner submerged the Indians, 7-1, to advance to the best-of-three finals of the Flyers Cup. Bonner, now 21-0-2, will face William Tennent, a 7-2 winner over Archbishop Ryan in the other semifinal. Despite Thursday’s lopsided outcome, Friars coach Ted Dolan wasn’t overly pleased with his team’s performance. Unionville went up, 1-0, just 3 minutes, 45 seconds into the contest on a Dave Donato goal, and Bonner had to scramble most of the period before taking a 2-1 lead on goals 48 seconds apart by Ange LaBuono and Mark Anzideo. “I wasn’t happy,” Dolan said. “They were outhustling us, outhitting us, and outsmarting us.” The Friars, however, maintained pressure, and that was the downfall for Unionville, a team with a good top line but not enough balance. “Their depth was more than we’d seen all year,” said McGarry, whose team finished the year at 18-3.
The Friars expanded their lead to 4-1 in the second period when La Buono netted a goal off his own rebound with 4:19 remaining, and with 1:45 left, Ed Smith swatted in a rebound of Jerry DiStefano’s blast from the point. The third period saw the Friars stage a relentless attack on Unionville goalie Kevin Crotchfelt. The senior netminder yielded goals to Chris Sambuco, Tom Ely, and Mike Jacobs in a 10-minute span, before being yanked with 5:32 left after giving up 7 goals on 26 shots. At the other end of the ice, Bonner goalie Jim Bauer put the opening goal behind him and came up with a stellar effort, stopping 16 of 17 shots. “He let the first one in, but after that, he made some bell-ringer saves until we could get a hand on them,” Dolan said. LaBuono attributed the Friars’ slow start to being a bit overconfident after a 7-2 preseason victory over the Indians.
“We beat them before and were thinking about that,” said LaBuono, the team’s leading scorer. “We just sat back at first to see what they could do. It took a while, but once we saw what we could do, we took it to them.” Bonner, which has never won the Flyers Cup at the tier I level, begins that quest tonight against Tennent at the Face-Off Circle in Warminster at 7 pm. The series continues on Wednesday night at the Skatium at 8 p.m., and if needed, there will be a third game at the Skatium on Friday night.
By David T. Shaw
The Philadelphia Inquirer
