SAHA Girls get season underway on the road Thursday

By JAMES TUBB on September 28, 2022.

jtubb@medicinehatnews.com@ReporterTubb

The South Alberta Hockey Academy’s U18 women’s team has a unique season ahead.

For the first time since the Dunmore-based hockey academy opened its doors in 2020, neither the men’s nor women’s teams will be limited in their travels and activities due to COVID-19.

Evan Vossen, SAHA U18 Female prep head coach, said last season was fairly normal for them but he is looking forward to not having to worry about restrictions while planning during the season.

“It’s knowing full well that everything’s kind of planning to go ahead without any restrictions or limitations in any of the provinces that we visit,” Vossen said. “It’s just more of a natural piece for us getting back to about three years since that was the case. Which, for somebody that’s 15-16 years old, you know, you were 12-13, right? It’ll be a nice piece with travel, games with all those things to not necessarily have to maybe worry about some of those outside pieces and outside restrictions the pandemic created.”

SAHA’s U18 Female team finished the 2021-22 season with a record of 12-13-1-1, which sent them to the playoffs. The club bowed out after winning one of their three postseason games. After a couple of exhibition weekends ahead of their opening contests starting Thursday and Friday against St. Mary’s Academy and RHA Winnipeg, Vossen said he’d like the team to have the identity of a tough team to play against every night.

“We’re going to have a little bit of a benefit for the first time in our three years, we do have a large group of returning girls and there’s a lot of good pieces that come with that,” Vossen said. “We’re going to have to be a tough team to play against for 60 minutes. I think our conditioning, our pace will be real strong. It is early, we’ll see more after this weekend. But a team that is just frustrating to play against because of how hard we work and how we play for a complete game, there’ll be no easy shifts or easy plays.”

SAHA announced their leadership group via Twitter on Tuesday afternoon with Kendal Davidson and Tea Pearce both wearing a ‘C’ and Norah Andronyk and Riley Gramlich donning the ‘A’.

Vossen said having a larger returning group of players brings the familiarity and allows for an easier landing spot for their younger players.

“There’s a lot of things that we touched on over the last year and for some of those girls, the last two years, so they know what those expectations and those standards that I have are,” Vossen said. “Then hopefully they’re able to not only show them but also be able to work with the younger incoming girls to help that process and move that along.”

The SAHA Female U18 team has four straight road contests to start the season before the first home game at the Big Marble Go Centre on Oct. 30 against RHA Winnipeg.

Editors note: A previous version of the story stated the SAHA Female U18 team gets their season started Friday. Their season gets underway Thursday.

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