Traverse City Record-Eagle

Grand Traverse County

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October 26, 2009

Stars sweep Rangers, take division lead

FROM STAFF REPORTS

TRAVERSE CITY -- With a dominant weekend, the Traverse City North Stars moved back atop the league's North Division with a convincing sweep of Marquette to overtake the Rangers in the standings.

Kyle Jean scored two goals and Doug Clifford assisted on three scores to lead the Stars to a 4-0 victory over the Rangers, who had won nine of their previous 10 heading into the weekend series at Centre ICE. The Stars won Saturday's game 7-2 (see story, page 5B).

Nick Shkreli and Sean Burke also scored goals for Traverse City, and Shkreli picked up a pair of assists to earn the game's No. 2 star. Bo Jacobs and Chris Salomone also notched helpers.

The Rangers managed only 33 shots on goal in the two games to TC's 71, and didn't have any more than eight in any period.

"After the Janesville loss, we understood we had to come in and play a better team game," Stars coach Anthony Palumbo said. "And I thought we played better as a group. We really last week worked on defensive play. We spent about 80 percent of our time last week on defensive positioning. We've been giving up way too many shots. So it was nice to see what we worked on in practice get to the game."

And the Stars had a different No. 1 star in each contest. Saturday, it was Eric McLintock, and Clifford and Jean picked up the scoring slack Sunday.

"It's nice we don't have to count on one guy to do all the heavy lifting," Palumbo said. Everybody knows that if it's not their night to score a goal, as long as they handle their responsibility, somebody's going to find a way."

Drew Strandberg stopped all 16 shots he saw on Sunday to post his second shutout of the season. Stopping 31 of 33 shots for the weekend, he upped his save percentage to .905.

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