Club inline hockey qualified for the Division II national tournament after finishing second in the Rocky Mountain Collegiate Roller Hockey Association and will compete in Madison, Wis., April 6-10.

During the competition, the Pioneers will play Western Michigan, Florida Gulf Coast and Texas Tech in the D pool.

The Pioneers have the fifth leading scorer of the nation heading to nationals with them.

“I think that there is a great chance for us to win,” said Alex Payne who has 64 points in 15 games for the Pioneers. “We have solid forwards up front with Kevin Brooks and myself.

“Then our defense is strong if we can stay in our zone, with Chayce Duncan and Gabe Morgione. Our goaltending is strong as well.”

DU thinks that being a team that is headed to its first national tournament may cause them to be under looked by the competition.

“We just think that since we are little-known we will be able to scare some teams that do not know who we are,” said sophomore Aaron Merkin-Morokoff, the team’s vice president and goaltender. “All they have to go off of is our stats from the website and those cannot tell you the whole story about our team.”

What Merkin-Morokoff is referring to is the fact that most of the team’s losses came at the hands of one or two goal differences, two of them being to Division I teams, Colorado State University and Metro State.

“I think that if we have solid defense and solid offense up front from our forwards, we will have a real chance to steal this tournament out from under teams such as Texas Tech,” said sophomore Chayce Duncan, the team’s treasurer.

The team has only five skaters and a goalie going to nationals, but they are looking forward to having the short bench because their best players can stay on the floor longer that way, according to Merkin-Morokoff.

The only problem with the short bench is that the players could possibly get tired quickly, but the team isn’t worried about that happening.

“Three of the five players that we have going don’t really like to come off the floor in the first place,” said Duncan. “They usually try to stay on the floor as long as possible even when we have had a full bench of nine. I am just really excited to see what we can do out there.”

Payne, the team’s captain and president, thinks that they can out skate the competition.

“We are skating hard in practice to try to get used to skating entire games,” said Payne. “This will also help us have an advantage beating the other teams to the lose pucks.”