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The U15AA SEAC Tigers pose with their gold medals after winning thier bantam tournament last weekend in a 5-4 shootout.
It didn’t come easy, but the U15AA SEAC Tigers won their own tournament.
The SEAC Tigers pulled off a 5-4 shootout win over the Calgary Stamps to win gold last weekend in the inaugural U15AA Bantam tournament.
Head coach Chris Gustafson says he was proud of his team and the adversity they overcame early in the tournament.
“The boys were in a bit of a funk going into the weekend, they had a bit of an uncharacteristically bad game in the league just before and they really came together quickly,” Gustafson said.
The U15AA SEAC team lost 8-0 the weekend before the tournament and dropped their first game of the tournament to put them behind early. Gustafson says as a team they’ve talked about perseverance and overcoming odds throughout the season, and says they definitely came through in last weekend’s tournament win.
The Tigers ran off four straight wins on the back of Ty Wasyluk’s four-goal game in their second contest, earning a chance for the gold. The team’s win in the semifinal came down to the wire, as the Tigers’ Austin Murphy scored with 22 seconds left to beat local rival Taber and send themselves to the gold medal game.
In the gold medal final, the game was tied 3-3 after 60 minutes and required a five-minute overtime which solved nothing, leading to the shootout. After five shooters, the shootout turned into sudden death and SEAC pulled out the win on the backs of Parker McLaughlin stopping the puck and Davin Torgerson who notched the game winner. Gustafson says it was a tough Calgary squad his team beat for the gold.
“They were a very good team so hats off to our boys for pushing through, to be honest, a very tough tournament for anyone to win,” Gustafson said. “It’s six games to the final and that’s a lot of hockey in three days.”
He says he told the kids to think of all the hard work they’ve put in over the season to deal with adversity and the difficulty of playing that much hockey in a small amount of time.
“This group of young men that we have this year are just a really exceptional group of kids that want to get better all the time and are prepared to do what it takes.”
The U15AA Tigers sit in second place of the South conference with a record of 7-5-3 as they look to build off the gold-medal win. Gustafson says his team was able to find their identity in the six-game tournament, something he hopes they can spring board off of.
“It takes awhile to figure out your identity and throughout this tournament we have kind of figured out we are that defensively sound team who doesn’t want to allow many goals but at the same time can create enough offence to win games,” Gustafson said. “… We can all look back on this as kind of a turning point for our season hopefully and just use it as momentum going forward.”
