Hodag alum Losch wins Fraser Cup with NA3HL’s Helena Bighorns

Whether Jake Losch’s hockey playing career will continue after this season remains to be seen. If nothing else, the Rhinelander native has closed out the junior hockey phase of his career as a champion.

Losch played for the Helena (Mont.) Bighorns, who lifted their first ever Fraser Cup as NA3HL champions late last month in St. Louis. It completed a dominant season for Helena, which went 57-2-1 over the course of the regular season and postseason.

“It was a really fun week down there in St. Louis,” Losch told the River News in a phone interview last Thursday after the Bighorns were welcomed back to Montana’s capital city with a parade. “We had a lot of close games, which that hasn’t really been the case all year. It was nice to face some good competition.”

Losch, a 2021 Rhinelander High School graduate, is far from the first Hodag to skate in the NA3HL, or Helena in particular, after high school. 

Over the last few years, the Bighorns have been a destination several RHS alums — including Henry Kipper, Abe Laggis, Conor Pequet and Harlan Wojtusik — as they looked to continue their hockey careers. 

Losch, in his last year of eligibility to play juniors, said he got in touch with one of his former teammates about making the jump. 

“Harlan Wojtusik played here the last three years. I was basically just talking to him (last) spring about how I wanted to play juniors,” he said. “He had nothing but great things to say about Helena and kind of got me in touch with the coach and it basically just went from there.”

Losch appeared in 40 games for the Bighorns this season, recording 10 goals and 11 assists. Though the team had already clinched a spot in the Fraser Cup tournament by posting the best record in the NA3HL regular season, Helena waltzed through the Frontier Division playoffs, sweeping Great Falls (Mont.) and Gillette (Wyo.) in a pair of best-of-three series. Losch scored his final goal of the season in the series clinching win over Great Falls March 9.

Losch was in line to receive plenty of shifts during the Fraser Cup tournament as well. He appeared in Helena’s tournament-opening 7-3 victory over the Louisiana Drillers, but was scratched due to illness in the final game of pool play as well as the team’s semifinal and championship game victories.

“When I got back to the hotel, the room I was staying in, one of the other guys in there was sick,” Losch said. “I ended up catching whatever he got and had a fever I just couldn’t shake all week pretty much. It was pretty brutal.”

Despite being under the weather, Losch got a front-row seat for the Bighorns’ championship run. A 4-1 victory over Northeastern gave Helena a bye into the semifinal round where they ran into a familiar foe — Gillette. 

The Wild, responsible for the only blemishes on Helena’s record all season, got on the board first with an early second-period goal before the Bighorns responded with the game-tying goal later in the period, and two more in the third to win 3-1 and advance to the Fraser Cup championship.

Helena faced Northeastern again in the championship game and, again, rallied from down 1-0 to win 2-1 and claim the championship. 

The NA3HL is on Tier III of the three-tier junior hockey system in the United States, and it typically is used by players as a stepping-stone toward opportunities in higher-tier junior leagues, or collegiate hockey either at the NAJA Division I, Division III or ACHA levels.

Losch said the entire experience was vastly different than what he experienced at the high school level.

“It’s much different, a lot more physical, definitely a lot more skilled. It doesn’t really compare, in my opinion. I guess that’s the way it should be. It’s junior hockey. It’s definitely going to be a step up from high school,” he said. “They run a really nice program out here. We get a lot of nice amenities and stuff. They take care of us really well. It’s been a great overall experience, just playing with guys from all around the country. It was really cool to meet a ton of new people and skate with a lot of great players every day.”

Losch was not the only Hodag in the NA3HL this season. Cal Laggis played for Great Falls and ran into Losch a number of times during the year.

“I faced off against him probably five or six times this year, which was super cool,” Losch said. 

That Rhinelander pipeline to the NA3HL is slated to continue next year. During the Hodags’ team banquet, coach M.J. Laggis announced that senior Gavin Denis signed a tender to play with Great Falls next year. 

“That is a great, great source of pride for me,” coach Laggis said, noting that Denis will be the eighth player that he’s had who’s gone on to play junior hockey. “When you look at neighboring rinks and neighboring programs and how many kids go on to play after high school, that number is almost zero. When you look at the kids that go on and play in the NCAA nationwide, that’s less than 8%. You think about kids going on to play in hockey, that’s something, that No. 1 shows, they really love the game and they want to pursue it and that, No. 2, they’re willing to put into the time and the grind.”

As one of those players, Losch credited Laggis and the Hodag hockey program for preparing him for the next level.

“The more guys that are moving on to play juniors, I think it just speaks very highly go M.J. Laggis’s high school program that he runs, as far as just being able to develop guys to become skilled enough to move on to the next level,” he said. “The guys still love the game of hockey after playing four years (of high school), growing up and stuff. They still want to continue playing. It’s really cool.”

Losch said his plans for next year are undecided at this point, though he wants to latch on with a collegiate program at some level.

“It’s pretty much just try to finds some good options for schools next year try to just continue playing somewhere, wherever I can — D-III or ACHA Division I or Division II,” he said. “That’s a big league on the rise, being more and more competitive every year. I’m just going to go with the best option that we can.”

Jeremy Mayo may be reached at [email protected].