2010 0912 Another Week and a Tournament

Off Ice Training

The last week has been more busy than ever and that is why I have not been able to post anything. Last Sunday, we played a game. After a really bad start, we played better, but still went on to lose 4-3 to another team from Stockholm. Because it was only exibition, some of our best players did not come to the game to give the other players more time to play. After that, we drove straight back to our home rink in Taby to practice with the '96 team since they were short on players. Then we had the '97 practice right after. Both practices and the game amounted to over four hours on the ice. We had practices for at least two hours through the week every day except Friday after a tiring day of school. However, the busiest part of the week was the last two days. There were two '96 tournaments this weekend. The top fifteen players that were one year older than us played in the better tournament. Freddy coached this team who eventually went 3-6. They had a very rough schedule and played eight games the last two days. That only left eight '96's left to play in the lower tournament. Because of that, Taby picked Erik, some other '97's, and I to play up one year to the '96's for the lower tournament. Rafael, the assistant coach went to our games. We played three games the first day and won 2-1, 6-5, and 2-1. In two of the games, we scored in the last minute to break the tie. That gave us a head start in the winner's bracket which has four teams. The tournament format is very strange and is really hard to describe. There is no championship, but a second round robin. We won the first game today 2-1 with another late goal by Erik. That put us one point ahead of SDE who is from Stockholm. Our '97 team beat the same team 8-2 last weekend. I was surprised to see them do well in this tournament with older teams in the competition. We played pretty well and got the 1-1 tie which was all we needed to win the tournament. In the end of the game they missed a penalty shot and some other chances to be champions. Part of the reason that most of the games were so low scoring was because there were only thirty minutes to play. Coming up next week is more school and practices and maybe a tournament on the weekend.