NIAGARA REGION - The Dunny’s Sports A-E Atoms started strong at last week’s International Silver Stick tournament in the Niagara Region, but then slipped into some bad habits as they lost three straight games and met up with highly-skilled opponents from significantly larger centres.
But the Rock rounded out the annual tourney by qualifying for the ‘Tier 2’ medal round, reaching the semi-finals before bowing out to a team from New Jersey.
St. Marys got things going early on the morning of Thursday, Jan. 5, taking the Illinois Leafs by storm and emerging with a 7-1 victory. Julien Boyer and Dalton Lindsay both had two-goal games.
Later that morning, the Rock failed to repeat its early start, instead falling behind in the early going to Montgomery, Maryland. By the end of the second period, they found themselves in a 5-1 hole. St. Marys mounted a comeback but it was too little, too late, as they dropped a 5-4 decision to the Blue Devils.
Friday found the Rock taking on a pair of skilled teams from larger centres: the California Cougars and Oakville Rangers. In both games, St. Marys was guilty of watching the passing and shooting of their opponents, rather than trying to get in the way of those shots or intercepting the passes.
“They were a bit mesmerized,” admitted co-coach Scott Taylor.
Lindsay continued his play as the top St. Marys forward of the tournament, however, grazing a shot off the shaft of the Oakville goalie’s stick as he skated in off the wing. And also in the Oakville game, speedy Jacob Wiles almost broke in alone, but was foiled at the last second by a well-timed tap on his stick by a sprawling Rangers’ defender.
With the bottom three teams in their five-team pool all sharing round-robin records of one win and three losses, the Dunny’s skaters were praising goalies Devin Jackson and Alex Martens once the results were tallied.
Thanks to fewer goals against in those tough, one-sided match-ups, the Rock emerged as the fourth-placed team in their pool. This allowed them to advance to the ‘Tier 2’ medal round — against third and fourth-ranked teams from the three other pools.
Quarter-final win
That set up a Saturday morning Tier 2 quarter-final between the Rock and the Stirling Blues, from near Belleville.
In a back-and-forth game, St. Marys struck first, late in the opening period. Lindsay carried the puck in from the left wing and fired a wrist shot into the Stirling goalie’s shoulder. It bounced off his padding and rolled down his opposite arm, where Wiles was waiting, baseball-style, to swat it into the open side and make it 1-0 Rock.
Early in the second period, the Blues swarmed Martens’ net and were finally rewarded, after a scramble, with the tying goal. Then in the third, they thought they went ahead after another scramble. But the referee, after pulling the puck out of the back of the St. Marys net, ruled he had blown the whistle before it crossed the line.
Moments later, Lindsay and Sean Slater broke into the Stirling zone on a two-on-one. After a pair of crisp passes, Slater wristed a shot to the goalie’s same right shoulder. Again, it popped loose, and this time it was Lindsay who pounced on the bouncing puck and drove home the winning goal.
The tense 2-1 victory put St. Marys in the Tier 2 semi-final on Sunday morning against the Redbank Generals from New Jersey.
As they had done in both of their other early-morning International Silver Stick games, the Rock scored first. This time, it was Eric Taylor dipsy-doodling his way up the right wing before sliding a low wrist shot beneath the pads of the Generals’ goalie to make it 1-0 midway through the first period.
Lindsay and Wiles both had close-range shots on net, and Lake Taylor tried a wrap-around that nearly fooled the goalie. There were goal-mouth scrambles at both ends of the ice throughout the game — at one point the puck crossed the Redbank red line after furious work by Slater and the Taylor twins, but the whistle had already blown.
But the celebration was over for the Rock, as Generals gradually took control — not necessarily in territorial play, which was about even, but definitely on the scoreboard.
Early in the second period, a breakaway goal tied the score. Then they went ahead after the puck squirted out front from a scrum behind the St. Marys net. Then the heartbreaker: a shorthanded breakaway goal with less than a second to play in the second period.
Rock goaltender Jackson went to the bench for an extra attacker when the score was 4-1, but that strategy instead resulted in an empty-net goal to make it 5-1. And the Generals added a late tally to make the final count: Redbank 6, St. Marys 1.
In the Tier 2 Atom A-E final later that day, Redbank lost to the Butler County team from Ohio by a score of 3-2.
Note: In the Atom A-E Tier 1 final, Waterloo Ice Wolves defeated Sarnia Jr. Sting 5-3.