There were many reasons why we were rarely a good hockey school. This was one of them.
Speaking of which, when I was a freshman, we're the reason that the MSHSL dropped the horrible Tier I and Tier II format that they had originally established and switched to two distinct classes. We'd play our season in the then Lake Conference, going up against Bloomington Jefferson, Burnsville, Apple Valley, Eden Prairie and other big time hockey schools, and end up with a horrible record. So when tourney time came, we got dropped into the Tier II that first year it was around. Well, when we started playing the small schools and other schools with bad records we started mopping the floor with them. We ended up losing to Greenway (a small school) in the championship game 6-1. Greenway was a team that had beaten Cloquet earlier that year, who had taken Bloomington Jefferson into OT during the semifinal game in Tier I. After the tournament ended, our season record was 6-21-1. We hadn't won a single game until the tournament that year.
Things have become more stable for Rosemount hockey now, though. The city finally built an ice rink in 1993 with a lot of booster money and the state kicking in so it could build a national guard armory. Before that, we had to go all over the southern metro for youth hockey ice. Add to that, the high school had to split a rink with Apple Valley (AV and Rosemount are part of the same Independent School District 196, and the rink is attached to their school no less) as our home ice. My senior year (class of 95) we got a new coach and had a good team, losing to Apple Valley into overtime in the section semifinals. That AV team had Karl Goehring, Erik Westrum, Brad DaFoe, and a few other future D-I players on it, all juniors except DaFoe, I think. The next year AV won it all with a 26-1 record, including that 5OT game against Duluth East in the state semifinals.
