THE U REPORT Your Weekly USHL Briefing, Covering October 1 Through October 7

The USHL’s second full weekend of the regular season, along with a Tuesday game in Green Bay, gave us a clearer look at which early impressions are holding up and which ones are starting to crack. Cedar Rapids stretched its perfect start to seven games by winning in three very different ways, and Tri-City ended Des Moines’ unbeaten run with a first period few teams in the league could match. Defending Anderson Cup champion Youngstown fell to 0-4 despite a two-goal debut from newly acquired Stephen Cover, while Sioux City chose banner night in Sioux Falls to snap a four-game losing streak.

Last week was largely about sorting out which teams started well, and most of that question has now been answered. The more interesting work from here is watching how teams respond when the early results and the expectations around them stop lining up, which is where this week’s biggest stories came from.

The RoughRiders did more than move to 7-0-0, because each of this week’s wins came with its own set of circumstances. Friday’s 5-0 shutout of Chicago was the cleanest of the group, with Cedar Rapids scoring three times in the first seven minutes and Joseph Skidmore stopping all 19 shots he faced for his second regular-season shutout. Chicago had gone without being shut out since April 11, 2025, and it avoided that fate in every game of the 2025-26 season.

Saturday against Dubuque was a far tougher assignment. The Fighting Saints built leads of 2-0 and 4-2, and Cedar Rapids found an answer each time, with Jackson Fox scoring both shorthanded and on the power play, Ruben Westerling tying the game early in the third period, and David Bosco delivering the winner at 9:00 for a 5-4 final. Tuesday in Green Bay offered a third look, since the RoughRiders surrendered the game’s opening goal on the road and still came away with a 4-1 victory.

Through seven games Cedar Rapids has scored 31 goals and allowed 11, and the USHL identified the 7-0-0 mark as the best opening seven-game stretch in the franchise’s Tier I history. Henry Lechner has 12 points and Carter Ernst has 10, with Nathan Chorlton also providing significant offensive production. That suggests the offense is coming from several places in the lineup rather than resting on one player.

The Storm produced two very different victories over the weekend. Friday, goaltender Quinn Beumer recorded his first career USHL shutout in a 4-0 win over Lincoln, with Matthew Krayer scoring on the power play, Cooper Ernewein adding the second goal and the Storm putting two more into an empty net.

Saturday was the more revealing game. Des Moines arrived at 5-0 after beating Omaha 4-1 the night before, and Eli Bimmerle gave the Buccaneers a 1-0 lead at 7:20 of the first period. Tri-City answered just 24 seconds later and kept going, scoring five unanswered goals before the first intermission on its way to a 7-3 win. Samuel Courtemanche scored twice in that opening period and finished his hat trick late in the third, while Aleksandr Sokolov added a goal and two assists.

Courtemanche’s night carried some history, since he became the first Tri-City player to record an October hat trick since Nick Lapin in 2011. It was also the second hat trick by a Storm player this season, following Sokolov’s performance on September 25 against Sioux Falls. Courtemanche received a two-game suspension stemming from September 25, so his five goals have come in only four appearances, and Sokolov has seven goals of his own as Tri-City has scored 28 times through six games.

For Des Moines, the weekend exposed a vulnerability that its first five games had not shown. The Buccaneers had spent that stretch proving they could win in a variety of ways, yet Saturday showed how quickly a game can slip away when they fall behind early against a team with this much offensive depth.

The Phantoms opened their home weekend at 0-2 after the Fall Classic and left it 0-4 following consecutive losses to Fargo. Friday’s 6-4 defeat at least produced an encouraging moment, because Cover, the Providence College commit acquired from Madison in late September, scored twice in his Youngstown debut and showed right away why the Phantoms made a significant move to land him. Head coach Nathan Paetsch said afterward that the team had played far better than it did in Chicago, even with the result going the other way.

Saturday brought a different kind of frustration. Youngstown went more than 44 minutes without a goal against Fargo, and then the Force scored four unanswered goals in the third period to win 4-0, with Samuel Hrenak earning the shutout and Lauri Kouhia contributing two goals and an assist. Paetsch felt his team had played well through two periods and created plenty of quality chances but could not solve Hrenak, which means Friday’s problem was keeping the puck out of the net while Saturday’s was getting it in.

There was a small transaction subplot as well, since Youngstown traded Linus Rudslatt Debou to Fargo on September 29 and he scored against his former team in Friday’s game. Fargo needed the weekend after dropping consecutive games to Waterloo, and Kouhia earned USHL Forward of the Week with three goals and an assist while Hrenak was named Goaltender of the Week.

Four games cannot define a season, particularly for a team with a new coaching staff and a great deal of roster turnover. Still, the defending Anderson Cup champions have no standings points, nine goals for and 22 against, and those numbers are becoming difficult to ignore.

The Lumberjacks and Capitols split a weekend that told us plenty about both teams. Friday belonged to Muskegon, which trailed 3-2 before scoring four consecutive second-period goals, three of them within 58 seconds, on its way to a 6-3 victory, and goaltender Oscar Westman turned aside 45 of 48 shots, an unusually heavy workload for a team that won by three.

Saturday went the other way, even though Muskegon again put itself in position to win. The Lumberjacks took three separate one-goal leads, and Madison erased every one of them, including a third-period equalizer from Landon MacSwain just 67 seconds after Muskegon had moved ahead. The Capitols finished the job in a 4-3 shootout win, which was their first victory of the season and the first for Trent Eigner as head coach. Defenseman Logan Lutner scored three times over the weekend, two of them Saturday, and was named USHL Defenseman of the Week.

The most compelling individual story belongs to 16-year-old Muskegon forward Zaac Charbonneau, who scored twice Saturday to reach six goals and nine points through six games. Head coach Colten St. Clair pointed to a “killer instinct” after Charbonneau came out of the penalty box and scored on a breakaway, and that goal says a lot about how quickly he is establishing himself among the league’s most productive young players. Muskegon still has to learn how to protect a lead, though, and Madison made that clear.

Saturday was supposed to be a night of celebration in Sioux Falls, where the defending Clark Cup champions were set to raise their fourth championship banner before facing I-29 rival Sioux City. The evening took a turn just 15 seconds into the game, when Sioux City’s Max Anderson and Sioux Falls’ Wade Weil dropped their gloves, and the Musketeers went on to build a lead and win 5-3.

Sioux Falls outshot Sioux City 41-20, but the Musketeers got goals from five different players and killed off eight of nine Stampede power plays, with Gavin Carr scoring shorthanded along the way. The result was especially surprising because Sioux Falls had won 5-2 in Sioux City the night before, and the Stampede power play has now gone 1-for-9 in this game after converting just one of 18 chances against Tri-City last week. Sioux City deserves credit for the response after four straight losses, and Sioux Falls has a legitimate special-teams question to answer.

Last week’s concern in Waterloo was whether the Black Hawks could keep winning if they continued to lean on goaltending, and Friday’s 6-3 home-opening win over Dubuque offered a different kind of evidence. Dylan Nolan scored twice in the first period, once shorthanded and once on the power play, and Hayden Russell also scored twice in front of 2,258 fans, the largest crowd for a Black Hawks home opener since 2023. At 4-0-1 with nine of a possible 10 points, Waterloo also beat a Dubuque team that had won all five meetings between the clubs in 2025-26 and 17 of the previous 21 over three seasons.

Discipline stayed in the conversation, with the league announcing six new suspensions from October 2 and 3. Lincoln and Tri-City combined for 83 penalty minutes in the first period alone on October 2, and a Lincoln goal was taken off the board after a review for goaltender interference. One weekend is not enough to call it a trend, so the better question is whether the physical play continues to affect results as rivalries develop.

The coming weekend brings several matchups that could shape how we view the first month. Youngstown travels to Dubuque on October 9 and 10 in a meeting of two teams trying to stop losing streaks, since the Fighting Saints have dropped three straight after opening 2-0, and it will give us another look at Cover’s impact and whether Paetsch’s belief in his team’s play starts to show up on the scoreboard.

Cedar Rapids hosts Madison on October 9 and Omaha on October 10, while Fargo visits Sioux Falls on October 9 before the teams switch locations the next night. That series should tell us more about Fargo’s improving goaltending and about whether the Stampede power play can find its footing. Muskegon also visits Chicago for two games, where the Lumberjacks will try to stop giving up leads and the Steel, who lost 2-1 in overtime to Green Bay in their first official home game at USG Arena, look to bounce back. With Charbonneau playing the way he is, that series could be one of the more interesting individual matchups of the weekend.

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