After a lacklustre loss to one of the lower-tier teams in the B.C. Hockey Major Midget League, the Cariboo Cougars responded with a pair of victories against the club closest to them in the standings. In the process, the Cougars assured themselves of at least a second-place finish.
The 15- to 17-year-old Cougars were coming off a 5-3 defeat at the hands of the Kootenay Ice on Feb. 11 at Kin 1. The win for Kootenay was just its ninth in 31 games. The Cats - with that bitter taste in their mouths - made some adjustments in practice during the week and then hit the road for a doubleheader against the third-place Fraser Valley Thunderbirds. The Cougars won both games, 6-5 on Saturday and 6-3 on Sunday.
"We were kind of leery about a letdown during the season and we had it against Kootenay," said Cariboo head coach Tyler Brough. "For me, it was effort-wise. We had a tough week at practice and fixed a few things in our defensive game, a few areas of our game that we weren't happy with, and I thought this weekend our guys executed the changes. The effort level was up and obviously we got the results that we wanted against a good hockey team."
The wins against the Thunderbirds gave the Cougars a 27-6-3-0 record. Fraser Valley, meanwhile, dropped to 21-11-1-1. With four games left in their schedule, the Cougars are tied in points with the front-running Valley West Hawks (27-4-2-1) but the Hawks have six games left to play.
The objective now for the Cougars is to add four more victories to their total and give the Hawks a challenge for the regular-season championship. The Cats will visit the sixth-place Vancouver Northwest Giants this weekend. Then, after a bye weekend, they'll be in Kelowna to take on the Okanagan Rockets - currently in fourth place - on March 10-11.
In the wins against the Thunderbirds, the Cougars got solid performances from throughout their lineup but one guy who stood out was 17-year-old winger Mason Richey, a Terrace product who had a goal and two assists on Saturday and added another goal and three helpers on Sunday.
"One of the adjustments we made, we shook up his line a little bit," Brough said. "We gave him two new linemates (centre Lane Goodwin and left winger Tanner Bahm) that we thought were really going, just to change things up a little bit, and it worked. It sparked him a little bit. He's a guy that needs to be going for us - we depend on him a lot and we expect a lot out of him and he definitely carried the torch this weekend, as well as a lot of our bigger guns did."
Richey, who was listed last season by the Western Hockey League's Kamloops Blazers, is the Cougars leading point-getter with 56 (21 goals, 35 assists) in 36 games.
The Cats are now in preparation mode for the Giants.
"I fully expect our guys to push," said Brough, noting that the team could become just the third in Cariboo Cougars history to reach the 30-win mark in a season. "We want to go into playoffs on a high, we don't want to be stalling. We're expecting to see a hungry Giants team. Obviously they're not settled in any position yet, they're still fighting to move up in the standings so we expect another good weekend."
Brough said the Cougars are 100 per cent healthy but they will be missing one player for Saturday's game. Forward Brett Fudger will serve a one-game suspension for a checking-from-behind penalty he was assessed in the final second of the Sunday win against the Thunderbirds.
