If you didn’t know the Wisconsin women’s hockey team (1-2-1-1 WCHA, 3-2-1 overall) was held scoreless in its weekend series at previously-winless Minnesota-Duluth, head coach Mark Johnson’s Monday press conference would not have helped you deduce as much.
The Badgers will host Bemidji State (0-2, 1-3) in their first home series of the season this weekend, with Friday night’s game serving as the inaugural game at the new LaBahn Arena. The game will also mark the 500th game in program history.
The arena is, to some extent, a product of the program’s achievements: The Badgers have won four national championships over the past seven years.
Johnson said a number of former players, including some who started the program 13 years ago, will be at LaBahn Friday night.
“[The former players] are going to walk into the building and are probably going to go, ‘Wow, these kids are so lucky,’” Johnson said.
Johnson regularly highlights how important it is to create energy—he says scoring goals is the easiest way to achieve that—and the Badgers might have a head start Friday night.
The inauguration process won’t be an entirely new experience for Johnson, who was on staff as an assistant coach for the Wisconsin men’s hockey team in 1998 when the Kohl Center first opened.
Johnson has won more than 120 home games in his career as the women’s head coach, and he ultimately hopes to carry that success to LaBahn.
“We want to make sure it has some excitement and has some home-ice advantage to us,” Johnson said. “But we’ll start that process Friday night.”
