It was an overall great hockey weekend in Revelstoke with a staggering turnout for the Hockeyville community shoot held on Sunday and a well-run, professionally hosted midget tournament by our Revelstoke minor hockey parents. Kudos to everyone for showing their community hockey spirit! It was great to see a sea of jerseys all over the Forum parking lot and inside. Congrats also for Ramona Shaw’s winning slogan which our Hockeyville committee adapted to state, “’R’ story begins and ends on the ice.” Nice work from a Big Eddy lady! On Friday, Oct. 30, the forum held a crowd of well over 300 people hoping to check out an easy win with an underachieving Penticton Lakers team. But, assuming a team is only as good as their place in the standings is an assumption not to be taken lightly.

The first period was an eye opener for everyone as the Grizzlies worked to match the intensity of the Lakers’ attack. They were on par or better than the Grizzlies throughout most of the first period; even though they had half the shots. The Lakers’ Lars Hepso backhanded a goal in as he was permitted to glide across the crease and beat Parent. With two power play opportunities to end the first, the Grizzlies left the ice down 1-0. Dayton Martens got the first hit of the game, levelling Laker Nicholas Kerr at the Grizz’ blue line.

In the second, the Grizz adjusted to the Lakers’ flow and started to play ‘their’ game. Randy Finkbeiner had a great opportunity on Parent early; but he was stonewalled by ‘Bernie’ easily getting the save of the game. Revelstoke’s first goal came as Faiz Khan scooped up a rebound to tie the game. By the mid-way point of the second, the Grizzlies turned the game around when Bruce Silvera received a bank pass way up the ice from concise plays by Brad Irving and Jordan Bledsoe. Streaking in with a nice, low snapshot, Silvera got the eventual game winner. Friedrich also had a nice hit on Ben Scott, but it looked like he’d hurt his knee on the play.

The Grizz regrouped effectively and went out in the third playing dominating with their puck movement and cycling game. The Caleb Roy to Faiz Khan one-timer is a thing of beauty on the power play. They added two more insurance goals from Luke Richardson and Riley Spraggs to win the game 4-1. The fight of the game goes to Esau for taking down Tripp Emmer. Emmer was quite aggressive with the linesmen as well and received an extra two minutes for his undisciplined conduct. Martens also fought well against Caitlin MacLeod in this period, They’ve battled before, but at this point, the game was all but over for the Lakers.

The Grizzlies travelled to Penticton on Sunday, Nov. 1 for a rematch and were in for a shocker. According to Coach Mick, the team didn’t show up in this game, losing by a score of 4-3 in overtime. Caleb Roy tied his jersey number in points with three assists in the game. Khan and Spraggs added power play markers along with Cody Abbey chipping in his second of the year. “We can’t ever use excuses. We must always play to our potential. We came back in this game from being down by two. We were ahead 3-2, then with eight minutes to go, took a dumb penalty and they tied the game. We had many mental breakdowns in overtime and Brendan Persley was able to get wide and put a slap shot in past Parent.” Persley had three points in this game and was a recent cut from the Vernon Vipers.

The Lakers are indeed a well coached team by Alan Kerr (who played 391 games in the NHL mostly with the Islanders, and parts of two seasons with the Red Wings and Winnipeg Jets.) They had their sticks in the passing lanes and were effective at pouncing on the Grizzlies immediately, taking the play to the Grizz and forcing many errors. Coach Mick had this to say about his counterpart’s team, “They played extremely well this week against us. Even though we out-shot them all weekend, our guys didn’t rise to the challenge on Sunday. There’s going to be a lot of hard practices this week and we’ll re-establish our work ethic and routines. You can’t just look at the standings and decide to play at 50 per cent. You have to ignore the statistics. We did barely enough to win this weekend, and weren’t as good as we have been in previous games.”

On the positive side, the Grizzlies earned three out of four possible points. Six of the Grizzlies are in the top 20 in scoring in the entire KIJHL. Also, as of Sunday, Nov. 1st and through to Friday night’s games, the Grizzlies are now in sole possession of first place in the KIJHL. This Friday, Nov. 6, they face off against the Chase Chiefs, who are in the middle of the pack in the North Okanagan/Shuswap Division. Come out this Friday to show your support and let’s try to crack 500 people in the Forum. Are we Hockeyville, or not? See you there!