The Estevan Prairie Mud peewee A Bruins captured their second-straight Winnipeg Jets Challenge Cup championship over the holidays.
“There is something special emerging here with this team and with these kids,” said Bruins head coach Lloyd Sehn. “Our record on the season now is 11-1 and we’ve been teaching a lot of systems and moving the puck east and west and south and the kids are now starting to see the benefits and the belief in it.”
The opportunity to defend the Winnipeg Jets Challenge Cup title started with a touch of adversity for the Bruins. The team battled through snow covered roads to reach the MTS Iceplex in the Manitoba capital for their first game of the competition, but the hard journey didn’t seem to faze the club as they dominated their Dec. 27 tournament opener against the Varsity View Falcons by a score of 8-1.
The Bruins next match, an 8-3 win over the Winnipeg Tuxedo Lightning, proved a tougher test as clubs fought back and forth through the opening 40 minutes with the Black and Gold finally breaking the game open in the third period. The momentum gained from the late outburst carried into the second day of the tournament as the Bruins first dispatched the Woodhaven Canucks 10-1 before knocking off the Glenwood Bruins by the same score.
“Going into the last round-robin game against the (Warren) Jr. Mercs we were following the online scoring and we knew they were every bit as strong and capable as we were, so we put a plan of attack in place,” said Sehn. “We juggled our lines a little bit and we understood which players of theirs to have key matchups against (and) when we got to (that) game we executed.”
Hayden Lavoie, Blayze Siebert and Tate Kasick each found the back of the net, while goaltender Ryan Chernoff picked up the shutout in the 3-0 win over the Jr. Mercs. The victory set the Bruins up for a semifinal contest against the Stonewall Blues on Dec. 30.
The Blues and Bruins battled to a 2-2 tie through the first two periods before Zack Gedak notched the go-ahead goal on a backhand into the top corner. Estevan added two more unanswered markers late in the contest to secure a berth in the championship game later that day against the Jr. Mercs.
The Jr. Mercs struck first on an early first period goal with Siebert replying 7:26 into the middle frame. Gedak lit the lamp a minute-and-a-half later to put the Bruins up 2-1 before Lavoie potted the insurance marker in the third period.
“When we were down one, you could see the kids slumped a little bit,” said Sehn. “The message at the intermission was don’t worry about it. Let’s play our game. Let’s pressure the puck, limit their chances, get pucks to the net and score on the secondary opportunities. That’s what it takes. They just battled back and they never looked down. They never stopped and that’s probably the most important thing. They believed they could and from there they took matters into their own hands.”
The peewee A Bruins, which include select kids from Estevan Minor Hockey Association tier 2 peewee teams, play their final road tournament of the season this weekend in Minot, North Dakota, with the club beginning Saskatchewan Hockey Association provincial playoff action later this month. The Bruins captured their first tournament championship in early December in Melfort and will host a peewee A competition in late March.
