The only team to score more than a pair of goals against the Notre Dame Hounds’ tournament winners this past weekend was the St. Albert Slash.
Pursuit of Excellence (POE), based out of Kelowna, went on to win the annual affair, but not before the Slash (10-7-5) outperformed the Alberta Major Midget Female Hockey League’s north division-leading Edmonton Thunder (15-2-3) and second-place Lloydminster Steelers (11-7-4). The Thunder, second only to the Calgary Flyers (16-3-2) in league play, lost all five of their games at the tournament.
“You can look at it different ways, but the only team that beat us was the team that won the entire tournament,” said head coach Terry Sydor. “We played five different good teams not in our league.”
The Slash posted wins of 5-1 against Weyburn and 4-1 against Westman, the 2009 ESSO Cup national champions. In the semifinals the Slash scored a 4-1 win over Regina, hosts for the 2010 nationals.
The Slash went on to take the pool B gold medal with a 4-3 victory over Pembina Valley.
For Sydor, the tournament was nothing except a positive step in the right direction for the Slash, as they were struggling a bit offensively prior to the tournament. The Slash were 2-2-1 in their previous five games before heading east.
Sydor said POE was in a league of its own in the tournament, icing only 11 players in their contest against the Slash and still coming out on top with the 8-4 win.
“Every team was good and well coached. They were all tough games. We did real well. The Pursuit game, they caught us in awe a bit,” he said. “With the U18 Team Canada girls they have, they dominated.”
Sydor said the gears started clicking just before the tournament however. In their last pair of games the Slash beat Sherwood Park (7-10-3) 7-1 and lost to Lloydminster 2-1.
“Finally everything we were trying to do clicked against Sherwood Park. We just handled them. Against Lloyd we played really well, but we just couldn't score,” he said. “We've been playing good hockey lately. We had a lot of time to prepare with nine or 10 hours on the bus to strategize and look at video. You can have meetings with your team and it's more of a focused atmosphere.”
Sydor said the girls finally bought into their systems after seeing some results against Sherwood Park in big ways. And with a modified power play orientation that suddenly started producing, the smiles and grit started coming.
“There were lots of blue-collar plays from us. We were blocking lots of shots and our penalty killing was incredible. These teams we're playing, their power plays are phenomenal and we were shutting them down,” he said. “Hopefully we can just continue on. You want to go into Christmas on a high, and obviously we have the Mac's coming up so if we can keep doing what we're doing and they keep seeing the results that we've been getting, the buy-in follows.”
