
When Sean Dhooghe scored his third goal of the game to put the University of Wisconsin men’s hockey team ahead for good late in the first game of a playoff series at Penn State last March, it ended two long hat trick droughts for the team.
The Badgers hadn’t had a player score three times in a contest in more than five years, since Michael Mersch did in January 2014. They hadn’t recorded a postseason hat trick since Joe Pavelski’s performance in a 2006 NCAA regional game.
Not bad company for Dhooghe to join with his 15th — and final, as it turned out — goal of the season.
But there are subtexts to Dhooghe leading the 2018-19 Badgers in goal-scoring. One: No one else was able to reach double digits, making it only the second time in the 56-year modern era of the program only one player got to 10 goals.
Also: Dhooghe was OK with how he played but decidedly not OK with how the season turned out. The Badgers were finished by early March for the second straight year, with a 14-18-5 record.
“At the end of the day, it needs to be more,” Dhooghe said. “Every single guy in the locker room needs to bring more.”
Now a junior who’ll serve as an alternate captain in 2019-20, Dhooghe is adamant that work ethic traits that may have gotten by in the past won’t be acceptable anymore.
“Expectations are high,” he said. “And everyone knows that we’re coming in with high expectations. But I think the best part is we’re seeing everybody on the team, both staff and players, raising the bar every day.”
Over his first two seasons, Dhooghe has become one of the recognized players around the UW team for his willingness to play a game that doesn’t match his 5-foot-3 stature.
But here’s what else you need to know about Dhooghe’s makeup: The expectations he sets for himself are extraordinarily high.
“I think it’s something that I’ve had just internally within myself,” he said. “It was instilled in me in a young age by my father that there’s no quitting, there’s no leaving anything behind, no leaving teammates behind. Right or wrong, there’s always a decision. And every decision you make impacts your life positively or negatively, whether you realize it or not.”
Dhooghe keeps his eye on the puck during practice at the Kohl Center. Dhooghe led the team with 15 goals last season.
Classmate Tarek Baker once said something that has stuck with Dhooghe as a perfect way of expressing his drive: He hates to lose more than he likes to win.
“We can’t be celebrating on weekends when we win, it’s got to be normal,” Dhooghe said. “It’s got to be the normal thing, and when we lose it’s going to be not normal. And I think that’s where our mindset lacked last year was we didn’t expect to win.”
Dhooghe had one-third of his season goal total by the time the season’s second weekend was over last October. He scored once in the series finale against Boston College, then twice each at Clarkson and St. Lawrence.
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