Re: Bulldogs 09-10 Season
That's true. And a bunch of people on here will tell you that when I put myself in the position of defending Coach Miller, it is unfamiliar territory for me.
But what she did makes sense to me. By her own admission, she had kind of written off the conference race at one point, so she was a little quicker to experiment with the goalie position. But that first game of the Minnesota series went a long way toward changing UMD's chances in the WCHA, and thereafter, I think she tried to do what she thought gave her team the best chance to win that day. Harss and Steck may have started out roughly the same, but after one has played a lot while the other played sparingly, Harss is just more battle-tested. It wasn't that long ago that coaches had a few games where the outcome was less in doubt and they could afford to start a goalie who may be green or have some rust. It's a lot harder to find those games on the schedule now.
I follow your thinking and on the surface it would seem to make sense. And of course I assumed that Coach Miller was doing as you said "what she thought gave her team the best chance to win that day" vs. UM. But there were a number of points made in my original post of which you and I have been discussing only a couple. If you were to follow the detail closely enough from the original post on this topic I'm sure that you would see that some of the above points you've made, even though I don't think that you were attempting to do so, aren't enough to just wave off the situation, because it simply doesn't add up. A couple of comments in your most recent post, quoted above, have touched on some other points that I had previously made that you and I have not discussed. Some brief examples of those and also some of what doesn't add up..."she was a little quicker to experiment with the goalie position"...quicker, here, necessarily means 6 games or so prior to the end of the season...that doesn't strike me as being overly quick when she had one goalie not playing well in October and had another one available in November after having recovered from the first ankle injury, which directly relates to your next point in that the first game of the UM series was the very next game, after Steck's last start, that UMD played (meaning a few weeks ago) and that Harss was played because she was more battle tested...again, another point that I had made in a previous post, as above, was that Steck was available to play during the month of November after recovering from the first ankle injury which was before Harss had "found her game" as someone else had put it. If Steck had been played then, we probably wouldn't be discussing who was more battle tested because the playing time would have more balance to it...which brings up the most important point that I made in the original post...which was that one goalie didn't have to end up being "green or rusty" come playoff time...since she (Steck) was available for the first two games of the season, for the entire month of November and since the beginning of January, at least from what I've been told...so it didn't have to happen...there were options...even taking into consideration the less than ideal situation of the ankle injuries and how that affected things...so this situation could have been avoided...and all of this, taken in its entirety, chronologically from the beginning until now, has caused the head scratching that later turned to head shaking on this end with the result being that the consnsus here is that it doesn't make sense. And again, this is all without even considering Coach Miller's emphatic and as of yet, unfulfilled, recruiting promises to Steck.
I guess the possible silver lining here is that if something should happen to Harss causing her not to be able to play in the post season and as a result, Steck is called upon, at least she got a bit of playing time in recently and played quite well and though not ideal in that she was not played a lot more throughout the season, hopefully she started to feel comfortable. As I mentioned to Binnyrus in the original post, hopefully it's not too little, too late and doesn't turn around to bite her team.
Even though I haven't looked at it this way, but since you made mention of it in no uncertain terms, I'll bring it up... maybe the bigger question in all of this is how you are going to deflect having come to Coach Miller's defence?
