Provincials-bound U13 A Boys end season unbeaten in league play

The St. Marys Firefighters U13 A Boys St. Marys Rock won their league championship March 23, completing a sweep of the Strathroy Junior Rockets to cap off an undefeated year in league play. The team will compete at OMHA Provincials April 3-5. Pictured in the front row, from left to right, are Matthew McCarty and Luke Savile. In the second row, from left, are Jax Parsons, Talon Nov, Theo Keller, Charles Coppins, Gavin Santagapita, Joey Brown, Keaton Ward and Attley Ehgoetz. In the third row, from left, are Emmett Parkinson, Talan Ward, Hudson Monteith, Liam Showers, Owen Leslie-Robinson, Nick Simons and Myles Havens. In the back row, from left, are coaches Harper Murrell, Jon Ward, Deon Keller, Jeremy Savile, Mark Monteith and Merlin Malinowski.

By Spencer Seymour

The St. Marys Firefighters U13 A Boys St. Marys Rock will compete at the Ontario Minor Hockey Association (OMHA) Provincial Championships April 3-5 in Whitby after a near-perfect, defeat-free season in league play.

Back-to-back, three-game sweeps in their two playoff series against the Mt. Brydges Cougars and Strathroy Junior Rockets gave the Rock a masterful 37-0-1 record in league play, with the sparse losses experienced by the group coming in tournament play.

Head coach Merlin Malinowski called his team’s season “incredible.”

“The more you look back over it, the more impressed you are,” said Malinowski. “To go through the regular season and two rounds of playoffs and not lose a game is phenomenal. It hasn’t quite set in yet, even for me. I think it’s one of those things that, as you move forward and you start to look back on it, you realize how impressive it was. They’re looking forward to this tournament, and they want to go in and do really well there, so in their minds, the season hasn’t finished yet.

“But I think, going forward in their lives, this is going to be one thing that they look back on and realize how special this was.”

Malinowski added the team’s well-rounded skillset and positive-yet-intense hunger to push one another to be better comprised the backbone of their strong campaign.

“It’s just a good bunch of young hockey players,” Malinowski said. “You have the skill, you have really good goaltending from both guys and then you have good defence. We have three lines and nine forwards who are all skilled for their age. And then on top of that, they all push each other, so if one kid was doing really good, the next kid in line thought, ‘I’m going to do better.’ There wasn’t any kind of jealousy, but there was a really healthy competitiveness within the team.”

Malinowski further described how the team’s excellent practice habits have built up their healthy competitiveness.

“They challenge each other in practice. When we would do one-on-one battle drills or one-on-one full ice drills, they were trying to beat each other, and that just makes everyone better. You can have teams where a handful of kids don’t care as much in practice, and so they don’t get better. But when we’re battling against each other in practice, if you’re making me work and I’m making you work, you just can’t help but get better.”

The Rock outscored Mt. Brydges in their playoff semi-final by a whopping 20-2 margin to take a three-game sweep before downing the Junior Rockets in three straight to claim the league pennant, scoring 14 goals on Strathroy while only surrendering three during the series.

“I’ve been coaching these kids for three or four years, and each year we’ve added a couple of pieces, and you could just see the depth on this hockey team,” Malinowski said. “You could tell this year this was a special group. Could you tell they were going to go undefeated in the regular season and playoffs? No, we didn’t know it was going to be that good, but we felt early in the season that these kids had a really good chance of getting to the OMHAs.”

When it comes to each player’s constant desire to improve and push their teammates to get better, Malinowski noted it’s a mindset not many teams manage at the U13 age level.

“It’s very impressive to see kids this young have that mentality. You don’t see that very often, where you have a team of 15 kids, 15 individuals, that are all on the same page as far as competing with each other. And again, there was never any jealousy. When you have that, you can start tearing guys down instead of trying to rise up to their level.

“One of the other impressive things for me as a coach is one night, it would be one kid doing well, and the next night, it was a different kid, and the next night, a different kid,” Malinowski continued. “Everybody has their moments to shine, and it just rolled throughout the year.”

When looking ahead to provincials, Malinowski noted the team simply has to keep performing the way they have up to this point.

“We just have to keep playing the way we’ve been playing and just really stay focused in the moment. When we were at internationals, we lost focus in a couple of games for various reasons, and I think for us to have success, if we can go in there and just really focus on the game and playing between the whistles, they’re going to have a decent chance.”