Congrats to our Jr Ranger kids for a hard fought ("ugly" at times) win last night to start our Tier 1 Playoff Round Robin of 15 games.
Reflecting back on our season to-date, there is lots to be proud of including finishing 1st overall for Ontario Alliance (Major Atom MD) during the regular season (East, Central and West) coupled with an 0.889 winning % over our 18 league games thus far (total of 15 wins, 2 ties and only 1 loss that was 3 months ago vs our Kitchener Blue counterpart). Our current record is 2nd best across all KMHA Jr Ranger Rep teams behind only our AA Minor Peewee team who has a 0.913 winning % in league play.
Looking back at our tournaments, we intentionally chose our first 3 tournaments so that we would face some strong competition, one of which we won (Belleville) and the other two where we came up slightly short falling victim to some bad bounces and tough round robin opponents. The Kitchener Oktoberfest tournament proved to be a great learning experience for the kids and pivotal to our team now being undefeated in league play since the tournament. Next up is the Byron Optimist Tournament on January 27th in London.
As a summary of our tournaments, for the Silver Stick tournament we made it to the playoff round loosing out in the semi-final to the eventual champion North London whom our team finished ahead of in regular season play. For the Kitchener Oktoberfest tournament we missed the playoff round cut although finishing +8 GF in round robin play with 3 of our 4 round robin opponents making the cut along with our Kitchener Blue counterpart. Our Jr Ranger boys still have lots to be proud of even though we missed the cut knowing they finished ahead of Kitchener Blue in the regular season and that they defeated the Russell Warriors (Rep B Ottawa-area) in our Belleville tournament championship win (Russell is similarly ranked as Leitrim who defeated North London in the Kitchener Oktoberfest championships).
As for our current Tier 1 Playoff Robin Robin, we will now be facing tough competition every game through March 12th with the top 4 teams moving onto Tier 1 Playdowns. Congrats boys on kicking things off with a win!