By Tom Hopkins Unfortunately for East River they ran into a very angry and aggressive Timber Creek squad on Friday night and found themselves on the end of an 18-1 thrashing. Timber Creek came out firing early and often with Andrew Pineda controlling the faceoff to allow the attack of Preston Hopkins (4G,3A), Nate Gillan (4G) and EJ Wheeler (1G) to fire off an 8-0 run to end the first. Adding to the scoring was Junior Middie Seth Claar with his first goal. This is a lead that is hard to overcome when you’re evenly matched, let alone when you are overmatched at ever aspect of the game. The second found much more of what the crowd got in the first which was a rapid transition game from Sousa (3G,1A) Pineda (2A) and Trey Grenga (2A) and shots from everywhere by the TCHS offense. Sousa got on the board on the second with an assist from Hopkins and Nate Gillan scored his 4th goal of the evening on another nice dodging assist from Hopkins. Zach Gavora got on the board for East River in the second and that would be the only time East River could find the back of the net for the entire game. The physical defensive play of Brandon Brinkmeier, Braden Cassata, Adam Jackson and Evan Walker played sound aggressive defense from the first whistle to the last and allowed for a very mundane evening for the goalie combination of Hunter Loper and Michael Acevedo. This type of a game allowed Coach Trey Gordon to get field time for his younger players on defense like Sean Gillick, Brett Fazio and Nick D’Angelo. On offense it should be noted that freshman Dylan Mace (2G,1A) and Aiden Caskey (1G) both scored for the Timber Creek offense. As I said earlier, it was the worst of all scenarios for the East River squad as they caught Timber Creek smarting after giving away a win in OT to Boone earlier in the week. The aggression and stick skills of the Timber Creek program were too much for East River to overcome and they went down 18-1 in the district matchup. Timber Creek goes to 8-3 on the season and have a very rugged schedule running through the month of March and early April. Timber Creek travels to face a very tough Lake Brantley team on Tuesday night this week and then host an always rugged Seminole squad on Friday evening.