Loss wraps Jr. A Lakers’ home season

Team falls 13-8 to Kitchener-Waterloo Braves

The Peterborough Merit Precision Jr A Lakers fell 13-8 to the Kitchener-Waterloo Braves on Monday night to finish their regular season home schedule

2-8 and drop to 2-16 overall, with just a pair of road games left.

Spencer Pyke led the K-W attack with six goals. Taite Cattoni had three goals and two assists for Peterborough. Cattoni also got ejected for fighting with a few minutes to play, just four days after his older brother Holden got into a fight with the senior Lakers. It was each Cattoni’s first fight of the season and each had just a pair of minor penalties heading into the game in which he got into a tussle.

The game was close through the first period, with K-W leading 4-3, but the Braves pulled away in the second when Pyke opened the scoring then Jake Stevens scored a pair of nice transition goals. Brad Lyons short-handed then Ethan Walker on the power play pulled the Lakers back into contention with goals in the final 2:26 of the second period.

When the Braves responded by scoring twice in the opening 2:15 of the third to make it 9-5, the hole was just too big for the Lakers to climb out of.

Lakers head coach Ray Dance said while the record doesn’t reflect it, “There’s a lot of positive signs. We’ve asked some guys to do some different things later on in the year, we’ve seen them building and accepting those roles.”

The key to optimism for 2019 lies in the number of returning players from this team. Only forward Ethan Walker ages out from junior lacrosse.

“We lose one player compared to losing 11 last year, so the maturity is going to be that much better,” Dance says, adding that he told his players, “Keep working hard and keep preparing yourself game in and game out. Next season’s not going to be too far away.

Be ready to go.”

Captain Mitch Ogilvie also saw positive signs, particularly in how competitive the Lakers were in several of their losses.

“We played some good teams and pushed them to overtime, pushed them to one-goal games. We’re right there. We just need to close,” Ogilvie said.

“We’ve just been trying to build all year. We’re a really young team and experience helps a lot. But we’re just building for the future and keep working our tails off and keep on going and building for every game.”

The Lakers had a difficult opening to the season when they had to play about half of their season’s games before getting all of their veteran players back from school. GM Lee Vitarelli said there isn’t much the team can do about trying to push the games later in the season.

“It’s rink availability. Can’t do anything about it. We play Mondays, our alternate nights are Fridays, there are only so many nights available, Vitarelli said. “Your season has to end on a point, you back the calendar up, you play Mondays and Fridays.”

The Lakers have a pair of road games to wrap up the season, Friday in Orangeville and Sunday in Barrie.