The holidays ended for the Jasper PeeWee Bears with the resumption of league play last weekend.
On Saturday the team’s counterparts from Athabasca rolled into town, and on Sunday the Bears took to the road to play one of their two regional rivals. The games were very different in character and tempo, given the variation in skills iced by the three teams, but there were strong lessons learned in both.
On Saturday, eighth place Athabasca travelled to Jasper to take on our second place Bears. As is common with these young teams, it takes some time for each side to thaw out, so both Jasper and Athabasca danced around the ice for the first half of the opening frame, probing strengths and weaknesses.
Jasper would be the first to exploit a weakness 12 minutes into the period, when sniper Matteo Tassoni picked up a feed from Dylan Dekker and put the puck deftly in the Athabasca net. Tassoni would score once more in the first to give Jasper a two-goal lead going into the first intermission.
In the second, on the strength of singletons from Tassoni, Lucas Oeggerli, Adrian Torres and Dekker, Jasper really took over the game while conceding only one goal to Athabasca as the period wound down.
An additional four goals in the third—including two more from Tassoni, another from Dekker and one from Sebastian Golla—cemented a 10–1 victory for the Bears. It was an important victory for the Bears who are chasing Wabasca for first place honours in the league.
On Sunday the Bears played in Edson against the city’s second of two teams, which always gives our Bears a challenging game.
Jasper got on the board early, just four minutes into the game, when Oeggerli stuffed in a rebound off of a Golla shot, to give the Bears the early lead. Edson tied it up 10 minutes later with a beautifully deflected point shot that goaltender Kelan Polard had no chance of saving. This Edson goal, however, had two positive effects on the Bears, swinging the tide.
First, it fired up Polard who stood on his head for the rest of the game, making key saves when his team needed them. And, it seemed to fuel Jasper’s ACDC line of Torres, Liam Crozier and Camas D’Antonio.
With the period winding down, Crozier fed D’Antonio inside the left faceoff dot with a perfect pass that D’Antonio powered under the Edson netminder for his first goal of the season. This marker lifted his team and—coupled with that outstanding goaltending performance by Polard—was the difference maker.
Jasper extended its one-goal lead in the second as Tassoni battled through the Edson defense and banked a shot into the net. This would be the only scoring in the second period, as Edson moved to clog up the middle of the ice in front of their net and Jasper countered with strong defensive play from both the ACDC line and the team’s hard-working blueline pairings of Jacob Bartziokas and Josh Howes and Aidan Deagle and Justin McIsaac.
In the third, Edson really came on, peppering Polard with a number of shots, including two that snuck passed him. But with a two-goal lead going into the period, and a pair of insurance markers from Deagle and Dana Angebrandt, Jasper was able to hold on for a 5–3 victory.
With these two victories, Jasper will at least keep pace with Wabasca and gain a point on the other Edson team who only played one game on the weekend.
The Bears hit the road next weekend with a rematch in Athabasca on Saturday and a stop in Swan Hills Sunday.
You can read about those games here.
John Wilmshurst Special to the Fitzhugh
