OMHA TITLES:

U13 team prepping for OHF tourney in Cochrane

Wiess said.

While Wiess expressed disappointment that Ontario Hockey Federation no longer hosts a provincial championship for U11, he said he is proud of the team for what they accomplished.

“I’ll remember this for the rest of my life, as will they, I’m sure. The looks on their faces said it all.”

The U13 team also had a successful year with only two losses and three ties.

“We’ve had a fantastic year,” said coach Mike Brito.

The team’s tournament started off with a 1-1 draw against the Riverside Rangers.

“Riverside certainly was a big one for us. The last time we were actually playing hockey right before COVID shut us down, they put us out in the semi-finals quite handily. So that was something that was certainly on the boys’ minds going into this weekend,” Brito said.

“And I think at that point that I really started to understand and believe that we could play with these guys.”

The two teams met again in the tournament final, with Woolwich taking a 6-2 win. Next up for the Wildcats is the OHF tourney in Cochrane on April 22-24. While they will be playing against the best teams in the province, Brito’s players look to keep doing what made them successful all season.

“This was certainly one of our goals at the beginning of the year. We sent a lot of goals here, and we’ve scratched most of them off our list along the way. We haven’t changed – we kind of set a goal at the beginning of the year as a team and we knew that we wanted to work towards it. We just kept coming to the rink and the kids kind of gave it their all and so I don’t think that we really change anything,” he said

“We believe in the 15 kids that we’ve got and we know that we get a strong group of kids inside our dressing room and we rely on all 15 of them. It’s not like nine of them get to play and six get to sit there and watch – all 15 of them contribute to our success. I think that one of our strengths is that we worry about ourselves and control what we are able to control. We spend very little time worrying about the person on the other side of the ice.”

For a team not able to play any games last season due to the pandemic, making it to the OHF championship is a culmination of a two-year wait, Brito said.

“I’m certainly proud of the boys. They’ve been through a lot in the last couple of years and it would have been easy to be discouraged and maybe lose some of the love for the game. But if anything, it’s been the complete opposite,” Brito added.

“They obviously were rewarded for the hard work and we’ve got one more thing to take care of and we’re going to practice hard for the next couple weeks to get ready to see what we can do.”