Art Lamothe has a problem faced by many parents with kids in sports.
In addition to coaching daughter Justine to make the right choices in life, Lamothe has spent the past six years guiding his offspring in her ringette pursuits.
"As a father you kind of expect more out of your child so I tend to push her a little more than I do the rest but we tend to get along really well," said the first-year assistant coach for the Northern Lights under-19 ringette double-A squad. "We have a good chemistry together."
The Lamothe duo will put their chemistry to the test from April 9 to 14 in Burnaby and New Westminister at the 2012 National Ringette League championship. The Northern Lights team is made of women from Houston, Terrace, Prince George and Quesnel between the ages of 15 and 18.
It's difficult for the women to get together to practice - most times they arrange time at tournaments between their house teams of Houston, Prince George and Quesnel, and being up north keeps the recruitment possibilities low. There are five 15-year-old players - Cheyann Newman, Aimee Qualizza, Hannah Young, Rebecca Milligan and Saynia Pickering - on the Northern Lights team, which makes playing against bigger, stronger women a challenge.
But, most of the women on the team have played together in some capacity since they were in elementary school and have represented B.C. at the 2009 Western Canadians in Saskatoon where they won bronze after winning the provincial title. The majority of the women also won the gold medal at the 2010 B.C. Winter Games in Terrace.
This season the Northern Lights women competed in two tournaments in Edmonton and Vancouver before losing a best-of-three series to the Lower Mainland women for the provincial title in three games. Since the Lower Mainland is hosting the national event, combined with the Thompson-Okanagan team's decision not to field a under-19 team this season, the Northern Lights team earned an automatic berth into the 18-team tournament.
"I don't know that we'll win, but we'll be very competitive down there," said Lamothe. "With our past experience going to nationals last year and westerns three years ago these girls are very competitive and they know how to win so I expect them to give everyone a fairly good game."
At the Edmonton tournament in late 2011 the Northern Lights squad finished with a 1-2 record, competitive in two of the three games as a veteran Calgary team muscled their way to a lopsided win. When they played in the Vancouver tournament the northern women finished with a 2-2 record, beating Simon Fraser University twice and losing 3-2 to the Lower Mainland and then falling to a Richmond Open squad that normally plays in an older division.
On a national level Ontario and Quebec usually ice solid teams that are in the mix for medals at the end of the round-robin event.
Northern Lights opens the tournament April 9 at 11:45 a.m. against Quebec's Lac St. Louis and then they play their second game at 4:15 p.m. against Ontario's Cambridge. On April 10 the Northern women face off against Bonivital of Manitoba at 11 a.m.
Justine joined the Northern Lights double-A team when she was 12 years old and said despite a few challenges it's been fun with her dad as assistant coach this year.
"It's nice, but sometimes we can get frustrated with each other," said the 17 year old, who has also had dad coach her in house-league action through the years. "He's pretty hard on me, but it helps in the end so I'm fine with it."
