Seven of the eight teams in the Saskatchewan Female Midget AAA Hockey League have had the chance to play in front of their home crowd this season.
The Battlefords Sharks will finally get that opportunity this weekend.
With three regular season games already in the books, the Sharks will welcome the Notre Dame Hounds to the Battleford Arena Saturday night for a 7:30 p.m. contest to kick off their home schedule.
“We’re all really excited about being able to play here again,” second-year Sharks centre Jordan Klubida said.
“Notre Dame is a good team with a lot of hard skating girls so we have to be on the ball against them. We’ll need to be ready with passes and skating hard in order to be first to the puck.”
The two sides will then face each other again Sunday afternoon at 1 p.m.
Notre Dame had a 1-3-0-0 record heading into a road game against the Weyburn Gold Wings Wednesday. The results of that contest were unknown at press time.
“They haven’t had the wins either to start the year, but I expect this will be a very physical contest,” Sharks head coach Gary Berggren said. “Most of our games in the past have been very tough battles between the two teams.”
The Sharks have a 0-3-0-0 to start the season, with their most recent setback coming last Wednesday night in a 5-2 road loss to the Prince Albert Bears.
Prior to that contest, they suffered 3-2 and 4-0 losses to the Melville Prairie Fire on Oct. 15 and 16.
“We have a younger group so that lack of experience may have shown in the last couple of games, but we’ve been getting better each time out,” Berggren said.
“We have a lot of confidence in this group. We continue to get better every day and the progression of the new players to the team has been very exciting to see.”
For the returning players like Kulbida, the start of 2016-17 campaign has allowed them to build on the lessons they learned from last season.
“One of the things that you learn right away when you come into this league is that you have to be ready for the overall speed of the game,” Kulbida said. “Everything moves a lot faster than at the lower levels, so you have to be able to adapt to that right away.
“I think our team is getting used to that already. We’ve had some rough patches at the start of the year where we have been scrambling around a little bit, but we’re getting used to each other through good communication and we’ve been moving the puck around a lot better.”
Heading into this weekend’s home games, coach Berggren has been spending a lot of time with the girls on their overall conditioning.
“During our first few games we’ve noticed as a coaching staff that the girls have started to run out of gas in the third period,” Berggren said. “Sometimes that’s a result of being down a couple of goals, so we’ve worked a lot on making sure the mental part of their game is strong as well.
“For many of these girls, coming up to the Midget AAA ranks is a major change. We’re on the ice as much as four days a week in addition to doing dryland training, so that’s something that the younger players are still getting accustomed to.”
Alyssa Roach leads the Sharks on offence heading into the weekend with a goal and an assist in three games.
The other goal scorers for the squad are Madison Sansom, Jaici Wiegers and Kulbida.
