Sunday, August 24, 2014 - Submitted by KP Wee - MidgetAAACanada.com BCMML/National
It’s only the middle of August, but Major Midget Hockey is just around the corner in British Columbia.
All 11 clubs in the BC Major Midget League held their evaluation camps during the second weekend of August, getting ready to select players for their rosters for the upcoming 2014-15 season.
Teams began playing exhibition games days after the evaluation weekend, including the South Island Royals taking on the North Island Silvertips in Lake Cowichan last Friday night in the preseason debut for both clubs. Some other teams, though, decided to pack in several exhibition contests last week, including the Valley West Hawks, who played four games in four nights beginning on Thursday.
“It was important for us to get a lot of games in at the outset,” said Jessie Leung, the Hawks’ head coach in explaining why they were playing that much right off the bat, prior to Valley West’s game against the Vancouver North West Giants on Saturday at the Burnaby Winter Club.
“For us, we needed to see, really, where the bottom of the group was that we’re taking forth out of our evaluation weekend. It was important for us to get them in early enough so that we’d be able to see them and they’d be available [before many of them head to their junior camps on Tuesday].”
Though the players hadn’t seen any game action until this past weekend, most of the teams would agree that the off-season wasn’t much of a break away from hockey. “Our guys started skating back in late May, and we had a couple of sessions a week through June and July, leading right up to the tryout process,” said Giants head coach Clint Thornton following his club’s first intersquad game on Thursday night at the BWC.
The hard work seems to be paying off, in the opinion of Thornton as he provides an evaluation of his Giants club for the upcoming season. “We’ve gone through the first weekend of tryouts, and had a couple of tryouts…from what I see, it looks like we’re going to have a lot of depth up front, and [we look] pretty solid in the back end,” he noted, adding that the Giants would continue working right through August. Players will be on the ice every other day, and then start on- and off-ice training after the long weekend in September.
“There’s really never much of an off-season,” reiterated Leung with a laugh. For Leung, it has been especially busy since he took over the head coaching position back in June, after Tom Spencer left the club to take an assistant coaching position with the BC Hockey League’s Surrey Eagles.
“It’s been a lot of prep work,” said Leung, who had spent the previous three seasons as the Hawks’ assistant coach. “We’ve had to hire a few more staff, so we have a new trainer this year, a new assistant coach, and it’s really been [about] setting up our program for this upcoming season.”
For more updates about the BC Major Midget League, stay tuned right here on MidgetAAACanada.com.
