THUNDER BAY – Brandon Swartzendruber needed to find the back of the net in a big way.
Brought back by the Thunder Bay Chill to lead the offensive attack after sitting out last season, the Premier Development League club’s all-time leading scorer had gone six games this season without a goal.
The streak came to an end in dynamic fashion on Friday night.
Swartzendruber, 32, scored three times, leading the defensive-minded Chill to a much needed 5-0 romp over winless WSA Winnipeg (0-9-1) at Fort William Stadium.
It’s a relief, that’s for sure, the Colorado native said.
“It felt good. I needed to get that, just that first ball that hit the back of the net to get the monkey off my back,” Swartzendruber said.
Why did it take so long to score?
He’s not sure he can pinpoint any one thing.
“Honestly I feel like it was just a streak of bad luck. There were times I’d have a pretty solid game and get that one chance and just blow it. I couldn’t even tell you what happened. I felt like it was just happening and it was driving me nuts,” he said.
“Hopefully I broke through that.”
Defender Mitchell Osmond, who scored his first of the season in the 56th minute, said the team was never really worried about Swartzendruber’s lack of production.
They knew the goals would come eventually.
“It’s a long season,” the Australian import said. “We’d rather have our key guys firing at the right end of the season. As long as he’s finding his form at the right time – and he’s been doing the right things – it’s just a matter of him finding the net, which he did tonight.
“The goals are going to keep coming.”
That’s precisely the mindset of Chill coach Giovanni Petraglia, whose team, the top defensive squad in the PDL, improved to 4-2-1 as it hit the schedule’s halfway mark.
While the first goal this weekend was to bring home six points, the second was to get their star forward on the score sheet.
Mission accomplished, Petraglia said.
“We were all hoping he would finally find it, and he found three goals, so we hope that now that he’s found the net he’s never going to stop,” Petraglia said.
Swartzendruber’s first of the night was the first of the contest, coming in the eighth minute, the lone goal of the opening half.
He struck again in the 53rd minute to put the Chill up 2-0, an emphatic boot on the goal line that Winnipeg keeper Evan Barker had no chance to stop.
Osmond headed one home three minutes later, with Swartzendruber completing the hat trick in the 62nd, pouncing on a Abraham Villon rebound to make it 4-0.
Subsitute forward and Thunder Bay native Evan Sawula wrapped up the scoring in the 82nd, the third Chill player rewarded with his first goal of 2017.
The two teams will play a rematch on Saturday night. Game time is 7:30 p.m.
