U18 Warriors gets a split to end homestand

The Stratford U18 AA Warriors continued to show progress despite mixed results last week against the Kitchener Rangers and St. Thomas Jr. Stars.

On Jan. 7, the Warriors were routed 8-1 by the Rangers at the Stratford Rotary Complex but rebounded with a strong 5-1 win over St. Thomas on Jan. 11.

Head coach Riley Mathieson shared his thoughts on the team's performance over the past couple of weeks since returning from the holiday break.

“I thought today's performance, we were able to get back to what we were doing before the Christmas break, which was taking care of our own zone defensively, and creating chances in the offensive zone by maintaining a forecheck and keeping the puck in at the blue line. As for the two previous games we had last week, they’re against two top double-A teams, I got to give it to them. They're well-structured hockey games. They're physical, and they have a lot of skilled players,” Mathieson said.

“I thought we competed well against them, but not to the extent that we would have hoped. It was nice that we were able to get that practice there on Thursday night, spend a couple of hours out there with everyone, and get back on the same page. And that translated into the victory today, that we were a little more organized than we were in the two previous games before we had that practice, and now that we had that come out with, with urgency today and with the will to when we were able to get the job done.”

The Warriors head to London to face the London Jr. Knights White in their only game of the week on Jan. 17.

Mathieson says the team is developing a new game plan for the upcoming game.

“We're going to look at building off what we had last week. Last week, we had to kind of cram things into two hours. We got a little extra time on the ice practice this week, so looking to kind of build off some of the things that we were doing and introduce a couple of new systems,” Mathieson said.

“We worked on them last week, but they take a little bit of time for everyone to start understanding them a little bit better, so we're going to spend some time on that this week, as well as just developing our fortress and working on some positioning as well.”