FUN TIMES FOR JUNIORS
Embracing the world stage
It’s serious business carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders and the maple leaf on the front of your sweater.
So we’re pleased to learn these Canadian juniors can have some fun when they’re not busy living up to the hype of a team playing at home in the world junior championship.
The way skilled forward Mathew Barzal tells it, life with Team Canada sounds a bit like minor hockey tournament fun, other than the otherworldly expectations.
“We’ve had some bus rides and were six to a room in an apartment in Tremblant (Que.), watching movies, watching hockey, playing cards,” the New York Islanders prospect said. “On the bus, everybody is talking and playing music. Honestly, it’s been a really fun experience so far and it’s great to see everybody jelling together.”
Helping them jell is Barzal, an admittedly talkative sort who loves to dish chirps as much as he dishes passes.
The tournament hasn’t started yet, but Barzal says the group feels like it’s been together for a full season instead of just two weeks of training and exhibition games. A pending world junior tournament will do that to a group.
“We know what’s at stake,” Barzal. “We know how it would feel to win. We have an idea. We all want the same thing and we’re all competitive, so it’s easy to get along with everyone.”
Head coach Dominique Ducharme says a team preparing for a massive international tournament is so deep inside a bubble it doesn’t have the same sense of pressure the rest of Canada imagines.
“They know about wearing the maple leaf and playing for Canada, but at the same time, we’re so into ourselves, controlling what we can control, preparing ourselves, that we don’t feel that pressure,” Ducharme says.
“We just want to be as good as we can be.”