Coming off a busy weekend hockey tournament, our LL3
Wolfpacks had little rest before tonight’s 2nd league game, within
the second half of our Inter Town Season, this meant hitting the road again to travel
to Simcoe to play the Simcoe Warriors 1 team.
Our trek to Simcoe came on a night when the roads were wet, dark and dangerously uncertain due to the unrelenting poor weather mixture of rain and freezing rain. Driving through the dense fog, it was reminiscent about the players’ thoughts of the game ahead. Similar to the fog, I don’t believe the Warriors 1 truly saw our team coming and playing as hard as they did and evenly compared to their team.
Although, the Warriors 1 were the top ranked team in the league, we felt our team has improved immensely, since we had last played them. In addition, this time we were returning as a full team with no injuries, so the overall impression was this would be a great match up.
If little else that we earned from this weekend, it was that we learned to intensify our skating, passing and shooting. This new level of competitiveness certainly made our team more challenging and increased our odds of coming out on top.
Our Bantam Wolfpack started the game off well, playing the puck in much of the Warriors end, while the few times that the Warriors entered our zone, Hoogie held strong in steering the puck away from the inside of our net. The first goal of the game came down to 50 seconds remaining in the first period with a 3 way play, started from Ian to Jack to Hayden who scored and gave our team the lead in the game.
Wolfpack carried on with strong possession of the puck for the duration of the second period; unfortunately, into the third period our team seemed to lose some steam and faith, after the Warriors made two consecutive goals at the top of the period.
Fortunately, with only 5 minutes remaining in the game, our players regained their second wind and made some great scoring attempts; unfortunately, the luck was on the side of the Simcoe goalie. In fact, tonight’s game can best be summarized as an outstanding goalie highlights game.
However, I must admit that each and every Paris player had a huge impact in this game and coaches were excited to see better positioning, passing play structure and great scoring rush attempts.
Next game will be this Friday when our team travels to Tillsonburg to face the Tornadoes 2, the same team that our boys had the pleasure of hanging out with this past weekend at the same hotel we were staying at; although, they were playing in the Welland tournament while we were entered in the Wainfleet tournament.