UND junior defenseman Tanja Eisenschmid clashes against a Wisconsin skater last weekend at Ralph Engelstad Arena. Photo by Nicholas Nelson/The Dakota Student.

The UND women’s hockey team ended this past weekend with a shootout win and loss in its home series against No. 2 Wisconsin.

North Dakota tallied a 3-3 tie in Friday night’s game, but junior forward Becca Kohler was the only one to score a goal in the shootout to give North Dakota the 4-3 shootout victory. UND lost in regulation to the Badgers on Saturday, 2-3.

After last weekend, the UND women’s hockey team has competed in four WCHA series in October against top ranked opponents.

“We’ve learned a lot about our club, and that we need to work on making better plays systematically,” UND coach Brian Idalski said after Saturday night’s loss to Wisconsin. “This break we have coming up gives us time to regroup.”

UND has this weekend off, giving the team extra time to tweak aspects of its game before it plays again.

“We played a tough three weeks of hockey going into this game against some good teams that really challenged us,” junior forward Meghan Dufault said after Saturday’s game.

Leah Jensen scored her first goal of the season on Saturday to give North Dakota the initial lead of the game, but UND struggled to build off that taking a bad penalty shortly after scoring that resulted in a power play goal for Wisconsin.

UND struggled with finding a way to get pucks to the net and only had four shots in the in the final period.

Trailing by two goals with less than a minute remaining in regulation, UND’s Dufault scored her fourth goal of the season, but her efforts ended up coming too late — not being enough for UND to forge any sort of real comeback Saturday.

North Dakota trailed by two goals for most of the third period, only registering two shots going into the final minutes of play. UND was outshot by Wisconsin 31-17 and struggled to get anything moving through the neutral zone as time went on.

The loss has North Dakota sitting with a 4-5-1 overall record.

Lacking lineup

Last weekend’s matchup with Wisconsin was different because both teams were missing some of their top playmakers to the Four Nation’s Cup tournament in Kamploos, British Columbia.

UND was without its star defenseman Halli Krzyzaniak, who is playing on team Canada while Wisconsin missed forwards Emily Clark, Blayre Turnbull and Annie Pankowski.

The three players Wisconsin missed in this weekend’s series took a lot of points out of its lineup as the trio has 30 points so far this season.

Wisconsin’s Emily Clark and Blayre Turnbull, along with UND’s Krzyzaniak found themselves on the same team, while Annie Pankouski will wear the sweater for USA.

While both teams wait for their key impact players to return from international play, UND will look to focus on its week off to prepare for the trip to Bemidji State on Nov. 15.

Ben Novak is a staff writer for The Dakota Student. He can be reached at [email protected].