Wolves Peewee AE finish in first place

Written By BRIAN LOCKHART

The Shelburne Wolves Peewee AE team finished the regular season in first place with a 15-2-3 record. The Wolves not only clinched their division with 33 points, they topped the entire League finishing a point ahead of the Midland Centennials in the Georgian Bay Group A.

That's a pretty impressive record for a team with just 10 skaters.

Going into the OMHA playoffs, the Wolves are up against the Essa Eagles in the first round.

“We skate a lot during practices. Since we're a short team we work hard,” said Wolves right wing Luke Bennington of what the team does to remain competitive.

The team came out on top with an 8 – 0 shut-out over the Essa Eagles in the first game of their OHMA playdown series on Saturday, February 1.

“We had a good start to the season but where they got stronger was in their skating,” said Peewee AE coach John Hare of the team's improvement on the ice. “They're a short team – they're only ten skaters, so two lines. Most of the teams we went up against had three lines. We knew right from the start that we needed to condition them to be able to last the whole game. They did really well at being as strong at the end of the game as they were at the start of the game. We did it through practice. We worked them hard and they took on the challenge.”

The current series is a best-of-five match-up with Essa.

“I asked them not to do anything different on the ice that we did during our regular season because we were very successful,” Coach Hare said. “There's nothing that we want to change. The guys played very defensive hockey so we had a very low goals against average. We have two of he best goalies in the League. They actually finished one and two in the League. Part of that is because they are very good goaltenders and part is because our team plays very defensively. Not only do our defencemen play a very strong game, our forwards play defensive hockey as well.”

The Wolves Peewee AE team will play their next series game against Essa on Saturday, February 15, at the CDRC.

Game time is 2:30 p.m.