St. Paul Canadiens Headed into a Two Game Home Weekend

Tonight the St. Paul Jr B Canadiens will play out the first of two home games of the weekend. The Lloydminster Bandits will be at the Clancy for an 8:00 pm puck drop, then the Onion Lake Border Chiefs are in town Saturday at 7:30 pm. Head Coach Joe Young says the squad is looking forward to being at home after a tough loss in Cold Lake last weekend.

The Canadiens played a Wednesday nighter in Vegerville on Wednesday, which they on 5-3. However, Coach Young says that Cold Lake game, which the club lost 6-1, hasn’t been wiped from his memory. “It was embarrassing,” says the coach, “needless to say, I was pretty disappointed with that evening. I didn’t think there was enough work ethic.”

It was one of those nights, you go home and you can’t stop shaking your head – Joe Young Head Coach St. Paul Jr B Canadiens

Young explains the drive just wasn’t there Saturday night at Imperial Oil Place in Cold Lake, “the team’s a lot better than that. Obviously, you don’t take anything away from [Cold Lake], but if our team isn’t working hard or following the structure, things like that are going to happen.” Young is hoping it wasn’t overconfidence in the team, who’s performing better then the club has in five years. “It’s not like we’ve raised a lot of trophies over our heads, lately,” say Young jokingly. The coach hopes if it was a matter of overconfidence from sitting third in the league, the loss brought them back to earth, “it’s a fact that we went in there and didn’t play well. It was pretty disappoint and disturbing to me, I don’t like our team to play like that. The players totally went away from what we talked about.”

You’re not going to win every game, but it’s how you lose games. If you lose a game and you worked your hardest, you laid it on the line and you compete, I can accept that. But if you don’t compete, then we’re going to have problems. – Joe Young Head Coach St. Paul Canadiens

As for the Vegreville game, coach Young says the team came ready to work and it showed in the final score, “it’s funny when you work hard, you have a lot of success.” The team practiced Thursday to keep the skill up heading into the weekend, says Young, “there’s always room to improve and create chemistry.”

Home tonight, Young is feels the squad will perform for the crowd, “when you’re on home ice, you should have a way different mentality then being on the road.”