Chiefs and Braves confident going to provincials

Justin Seward

Times Reporter

 

Wheatland Braves head coach Keith Klemmensen knows his squad can not take a shift off if they want to be crowned provincial champions come Sunday.
“We’ve played two of the teams before and have had good results against those teams. I would say we’re going into this competition thinking that we’re probably neither the best or the worst,” said Klemmensen.
“We look at it as we’re in the middle of the pack and we have to earn everything we get.”
He has tried a few different approaches to get the boys game ready.
“I’m trying an approach where we got some bigger, stronger guys, so they’re going to get leaned on. The last three or four ice times have been intensive taking the puck to the net hard, a little less finesse and more speed and power,” said Klemmensen.
The make up of the Braves will be a smaller compared to other peewee teams that will be in the tournament.
“I think realistically, for a peewee team, we probably have a smaller team. We’re on the bottom end of things size wise,” said Klemmensen.
For lack of size, the team will have to make up for that with speed and skill.
“If we want to play in straight lines and drive the puck to the net and play a power, speed game more so than a finesse fancy entry game, I think we’ll have a good chance,” said Klemmensen.
“We’ve had the best goaltender in the league this year and hope to get the same goaltending we’ve had all year, that’d be a good head start.”
The Braves (Zone 6) began play on March 19(4:30 p.m.) against Zone 5 in Olds.
Meanwhile, the Wheatland Chiefs will have some familiarity with three of the four opponents in their pool and will know what to expect from them.
“I think we’re going in on a good note, you know we lost that last game but we’ve been playing good hockey and deserve to be there,” said head coach Devin Olson.
Olson is not too concerned with how they stack up against the competition.
“Our first game is against Taber which we handled pretty easily this year and then Red Deer Elks is the next team we play and they’ll be pretty good,” said Olson.
“The top team out of Calgary, we’ve played once and we beat them 1-0. We’ve played Peace River and that’s our other game, like just in the past northern teams aren’t as good as our (south teams).”
He is not wanting to change the match ups too much and go with the strategy that has been implemented all year.
“We’ve been playing well, the guys are finally clicking on how we want everything set up and done. We’ll get to play a minimum of four games so the more we can work on perfecting a lot of that helps finishing,” said Olson.
Olson added that the keys to success will be shooting the puck frequently and playing keeping the shifts short.
The Chiefs opened up against Taber (9:15 a.m.) on March 20 in Red Deer while the second game will be the same day against the Red Deer Elks (4:30 p.m.). For more schedule information, log onto www.hockeyalberta.ca and click on the provincials tab.