By Jared Sugerman

The women’s hockey team was unable to curtail its early-season skid Saturday, losing to Rensselaer 4-0 in Troy, NY. The Huskies are now 0-6-1 on the season, including an 0-1 mark in Hockey East play. The Engineers improved to 6-2-1 with the victory.

“We did not have a good showing,” said head coach Laura Schuler. “I’ve seen them play in games where they’re playing well and doing the little things right, and then to come back today and not do the little things was disappointing.”

Both teams came into the game looking to bounce back from losses at home to No. 8 UConn, but Northeastern suffered a setback at 12:20 of the first period, when junior forward Missy Elumba was sent to the penalty box for sticking. The Engineers capitalized on the power-play opportunity at 13:07, when Allysen Weidner assisted on Laura Gersten’s second goal of the season.

RPI doubled its lead at 17:59, when its co-leading scorer Guillemette’s recorded her fifth tally of the season on an assist from Jamie-Lynn Stewart. The Huskies went to the locker room after the first period trailing 2-0.

Just under eight minutes into the second period, Northeastern’s deficit had swelled to four. With her fourth and fifth goals of the season at 2:10 and 7:52 respectively, Weidner tied Guillemette for the team lead in goals and capped the scoring for the game.

Northeastern made a bid to come back, outshooting RPI 13-11 in the second frame. But, they were unable to beat RPI’s Sonja van der Bliek, who turned aside all of Northeatern’s 26 total shots.

“I think I counted in the second period alone five or six real good scoring opportunities that we had, and (van der Bliek) just obviously made the right decisions,” Schuler said.

Northeastern freshman goaltender Leah Sulyma also turned in a good performance, making a season and career-high 34 saves on 38 shots.

Freshman forward Kristi Kehoe left the game with an injury and was unable to extend her three-game point streak. Schuler did not disclose the nature of the injury, but said she expects Kehoe back for Northeastern’s next game, tomorrow at Providence at 7 p.m.

“We just have to forget about RPI and move forward and just focus on Providence,” Schuler said. “Hopefully, we’ll do that, but I think it’ll be good to just kind of quickly get right back at it and not have to really dwell on the RPI game.”