While preparing for the upcoming girls’ hockey game against Cretin-Derham Hall Feb. 10, senior Katie Fredrickson said she anticipates a challenging competition on the ice.

“I think the game will be a tough battle. (Cretin is) fourth seed and we are the fifth seed, so we got close seed, so it’s going to be an interesting game,” Fredrickson said. “If I had to guess, it will be a one or two goal game.”

According to coach Chris Erickson, the team has been spending recent practices focusing on polishing technicalities.

“We’re sort of fine tuning our coverages and just working on some shooting and stickhandling, but justbasically walking through the correct positioning,” Erickson said. “Then we watched a little bit of Friday night’s game on tape and are just sort of going at it with a different approach where we’re going to keep things light, keep them moving.”

Fredrickson said mastering the team’s defensive moves remains its biggest area of improvement.

“We have become a really close team, and all together we’ve been focusing on putting the puck in the net and playing really tight defense,” Fredrickson said. “We are really focusing on getting the puck out of the defensive zone quickly.”

According to Erickson, the team has one week of practice in between their previous game against Farmington Feb. 2 and their upcoming game against Cretin-Derham Hall. He said this additional practice time will benefit the team.

“We’ve never had a full week in between games, so we sort of schedule out practices where like (Feb. 6) we worked specifically with the defense for a half hour, specifically with the forwards for a half hour and then our power play,” Erickson said. “So we sort of scheduled out our practices to work on different things, and its nice to have this time frame to work on it.”

Erickson also said reviewing the team’s loss to Cretin last year will help drive the players to approach this game with the ambition to win.

“They worked so hard this season and everybody knows that has been through it that this (game) is what (the team is) working for,” Erickson said. “We are going to probably have (the team) watch last year’s game where we lost to Cretin in the playoffs because maybe that would motivate them to watch that and never have to want that feeling again where your season is done by that game.”

According to Fredrickson, if Hopkins-Park loses to Cretin-Derham Hall Feb. 10, its season will be over. Fredrickson said it’s a bitter-sweet feeling to know this could be the final game of the season.

“I’m excited to play, but I’m a little sad because it’s potentially my last hockey game ever, and so it’s kind of sad that this might be the last time my team is playing together,” Fredrickson said.

Overall, Erickson said he looks forward to watching the team play and hopes to end with a victory on Saturday.

“It should be a good game,” Erickson said. “We know a little bit about (Cretin) but not really because we don’t have a lot of common opponents, so we’re just approaching it sort of working on the things that we need to do better and thinking back to how (Cretin) played last year and trying to find some different things that we can throw at them.”

Hopkins-Park will be playing Cretin-Derham Hall at 2:15 p.m. Feb. 10 at the Parade Ice Gardens.