Congratulations to the Santa Rosa Flyers and our Jr. Summits

Our team played a solid game today and simply lost to a team that played a bit better than us. Congratulations to the Santa Rosa Flyers for a hard fought victory. We will be back to challenge them in the Wine Country Tournament next month and look forward to this new rivalry! It is great to have such quality teams to challenge and grow our program and our level of competition.

I hope that the players, team managers and coaches of all the teams in the MLK tournament had fun and want to join us again next year. I also hope that we can get some time on the ice with these teams in between tournaments to help our teams improve and grow.

Congratulations to our Pee Wee Jr. Summits for a great tournament. Although we lost in the finals, we showed up big and played a great series of games. We finished the tournament with a 4-1 record and recorded two shut outs. Not bad indeed.

Finally, congratulations to the women and men who put on the MLK tournament. I believe it was a great success and better than last year. I think we will continue to draw more teams from further afield as news of our hospitality and game quality grows. Thank you for a great time!

Headed to the Finals

It will, once again, be a rematch of the Jr. Summits and the Santa Rosa Flyers for the finals of today’s Martin Luther King, Jr Tournament.  Both teams were successful in their semi final bouts and have moved into the finals.  The game will be held at 8:30am and I imagine both teams are excited and nervous about the outcome.

In our semi final game, we faced the Oakland Bears.  Both teams played hard and I want to extent a special congratulations to the Oakland Bears team.  This was, by far, the best performance I have seem them deliver and they gave us a true run for our money.  Their goal tender had an outstanding game, stopping all but 4 of our shots (we had an empty netter as well).  Some of his saves were true robberies of our shooters.  It was an exciting game and I hope the Bears know what an amazing game they played.  I know that our team is well aware of it and of how close we came to not making the finals because of the Bear’s performance.

The Summits played a strong game as well, through all three lines once again and Paiute had another stellar performance in net.  This was a big game for us for many reasons, not least of which was that it was our first win where we came from behind having given up the game’s first goal.  That was a good test of our will and desire to win.  one which, happily, we passed!

Off to the finals…

Now That’s the Jr. Summits I Know

Saturday proved to me that our Jr. Summits are indeed the great team I thought we were. We played the Santa Rosa Flyers in our first game and it was just as exciting as the game we played against them in the San Jose Regional finals. It was a 0-0 game all the way until the third period. Our team played with inspiration and skill. They controlled the puck well, passed well, played solid defense, and worked hard for the whole game.

In the third, hard work paid off when our first line: Cy Jenson, Wyatt Spence, and Elijah Assam freed the puck from a scramble behind the Flyers net and got a shot on goal (just one of many placed upon the very solid Flyers goalie). That shot was saved, but a patient move by Wyatt afforded him the game winning goal.  That goal was solidified in the last few minutes of the game when Cy put another one past their net minder. This was all backed up by another shut out by goalie Paiute Morrison, including a two man break away late in the third period! Paiute’s stellar performance earned him the game MVP medal.

In our second game, we faced the Oakland Bears, a team we beat in San Jose in two games including the semi finals. They played hard and tested our resolve to win, but in the end we prevailed. We had a strong showing from our third line who scored 2 goals in our 5-3 victory. Obviously the difference in the game, these goals were the result of hard work around the net.

Chase Courtney gathered the garbage and deposited it in the back of the net to score his first Pee Wee tournament goal. Jasper Weatherby found his second tournament goal in the front of the net on clean up patrol as well. Jasper also performed well in the face off circle winning many of his duels, even against their first line center. Jasper was the winner of the game MVP as a result of his hard work and strong play in the face off circle and around the ice.  (Check out the great picture below with the puck catching mesh!)

It was wonderful to see the team playing with the skill and patience they have been known for once again. I look forward to their continued efforts today and hopefully tomorrow in the finals!

Martin Luther King Junior Weekend Tournament on Home Ice

Having just returned from our whirl wind trip to Pelham, Ontario Canada, the Jr. Summits have just days to prepare for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Weekend tournament on home ice. Our first game is on Saturday at 10 am against the Santa Rosa Flyers. This promises to be a great game as it is a rematch of the championship game in the San Jose Regional Championships which we won 2-0. It was a great game and this rematch will likely prove to be equally as exciting. Come on down to the rink to support your Jr. Summits!

This is the only tournament of the year held on our home ice and it is a great opportunity to show your support for this amazing group of kids. The tournament will also be host to 6 bantam age teams (13 and 14) and will also include a silent auction/raffle with all proceeds going to support our local travel hockey teams.

What an Experience!

Let me start by saying sorry to all of you who had hoped to follow along play by play with us here on line.  It is now 10: 15 pm on Friday and this is the first moment I have had to sit down and write about what is happening here.  It has been a non stop whirlwind experience.

I will start from the top.  We traveled to Pelham in several different groups and on several different airplanes.  Some of us made it to the hotel earlier than others.  In fact, the last group to make it arrived around 2:00 am Wednesday night (Thursday morning).  This was after a canceled flight and several lost bags, the most important of which was Paiute’s gear (our goalie)!  The airlines would do absolutely nothing to help us retrieve his bag and so we played the first two games of the tournament on about 3-4 hours of sleep, for about 5 of the team members, and borrowed goalie gear!!!  It was a disaster for sure.

Things turned around later that afternoon when all of our bags finally arrived.  That said, our record on the ice was not to improve.  We lost all four of our games and have now been retired from the tournament.  Hockey is everything here, and the level of play is FAR superior to anything we have seen on the West coast, North or South.  In my opinion, the teams we faced here could beat any team out of the Pacific division with reasonable ease.  Their skill in the fundamentals of hockey: passing, skating, and shooting is fantastic.  Their commitment to disciplined team play is admirable.  In most cases, it was the latter that made the difference.  The unselfish (REALLY unselfish) play was a true display of their desire to win as a team and to play as a single unit, not a group of individuals.  It was inspiring and humbling to watch.  Hockey in our area has a long way to go to get to this level of consistent growth and play.  I am excited to watch that growth!

To give you an inside look at how hockey lives here, imagine having 15 rinks in a 5 mile radius.  Imagine having a pro shop with several full time, fully skilled employees that is two stories tall and filled with everything you could ever want in hockey gear and the knowledge to properly outfit you.  Imagine showing up to a tournament and not having goalie gear.  What do you do now?  Here’s what happened to us. The tournament director personally drove us to the big pro shop whose owner met us there 2 hours before they officially open.  He then completely outfitted Paiute with everything from skates (custom sharpened I might add) jock, pads, glove blocker and chest protector.  Paiute had his helmet and sticks.  Now here’s the extra cool part.  Other than the skates everything was BRAND NEW!  The owner said, just bring it back when you are done!  I have never imagined such hospitality.  Truly amazing.

I could go on and on about this place and how much hockey is a living, breathing part of the experience, but I will stop with that save to say that this has been a humbling experience that will change the way our team plays hockey in Southern Oregon.  We plan to come back here and challenge the best again.  We plan to step into this new level of hockey and embrace it, learning what we can to improve how we coach and how the kids play.  Although we did not realize our dreams of coming home with the international championship, we have learned many valuable lessons that will bring us closer next time.

In the end, we are STILL one of the 16 best pee wee B teams in North America.  That is something to be proud of.  Congratulations to our team for all there hard work.