The road calling to Penn State hockey team

Now comes the tough part for the Penn State men’s hockey team.

The Nittany Lions have enjoyed a lot of home cooking, plenty of home ice advantages and nearly all of the trips they have taken have been pretty short.

Aside from a weekend in Alaska in mid-November, the team has not gone beyond the borders of Pennsylvania and New York, with no more than four hours spent on a bus to get anywhere.

Of the 22 games played this season, 15 have been at home.

However, there are just three home games the rest of the season, with 11 of the last 14 on the regular-season schedule away from the friendly confines of Pegula Ice Arena.

“It’s a challenge that we understand has to happen,” head coach Guy Gadowsky said at his weekly session with the media Tuesday. “We feel that, I think, not that we’re welcoming it, but we’re ready for it.”

The long and winding road begins Friday night in Columbus, Ohio, facing Ohio State (6-12-2, 1-3-2-1) at 7 p.m. They also meet at the same time Saturday.

The plethora of home dates has helped fuel the No. 15 Nittany Lions’ confidence, making them one of the nation’s top scoring teams and surging the team up the national polls.

But the team will not have the advantage of the Roar Zone student section, or the comfort of its own locker room, or the players’ own beds to sleep in each night.

“It’s a little more difficult playing on the road,” junior forward David Goodwin said. “Everyone’s pretty excited. Every time we get on the app or go online, we see our ranking and stuff. Everyone gets pretty pumped about that.”

Penn State (15-4-3, 5-1) has played just six games away from State College all season, and is 2-0-2 in true road games.

But it’s also something everyone has been expecting since the puck first dropped on the season in October. This part of the schedule was set not by Penn State but the Big Ten. The Nittany Lions got to enjoy home ice for the first three conference series – six games – but now must spend most of the next two months packing their bags each week.

“Any time you play in the Big Ten, it’s going to be hard whether it’s home or on the road,” Gadowsky said. “If you want to be a good team then you have to learn how to win on the road. It’s harder when you don’t have the best student section in the world behind you.”

One of the major things the Nittany Lions will have to do to be successful is to take their up-tempo offense and get it to work in some place different – against a team with which they have struggled. Penn State is 3-7 all-time against the Buckeyes, has never won in Columbus, and has a three-game losing skid against the team, including a 3-1 loss in the Big Ten Tournament last March.

While they will not have the huge home crowd to ignite the team’s energy, they likewise will not be able to derive energy from the crowd as a hated visitor. The Buckeyes play in the nation’s largest Division I hockey venue, Value City Arena, which is shared with the basketball program and has a capacity of 17,500 for hockey. But the team is averaging just 4,609 fans this season, lowest in the Big Ten. That many empty seats can deaden the impact of the home fans.

“Their building doesn’t have much energy,” Goodwin said. “You kind of have to create your own jump. You can’t expect the fans, whether they’re for you or against you, to get you going.”

But this will be part of what the Nittany Lions need to learn to do to be successful on a bigger scale. The Big Ten Tournament won’t be played in State College, and should they get to the NCAA Tournament this spring or any time in the future, those games won’t be at Pegula Ice Arena either.

It’s time for Penn State to prove its style can be played anywhere.

“It’s important to be ready to play our game every day, whether it’s here or on the road,” senior captain David Glen said. “It’s kind of what we’ve been talking about – sticking to what we do best and improving on it.”

This story was originally published January 21, 2016 at 9:23 PM with the headline "The road calling to Penn State hockey team."