A win doesn’t have to be pretty, which was a good thing for the Westlock Senior ‘AA’ Warriors last weekend in their North Central Senior Hockey League games.
The boys extended their winning streak to four with a win in Mayerthorpe against the Whitecourt Wild on Friday night followed but another victory over the Rocky Rams Saturday at the Westlock Rotary Spirit Centre.
In the case of both games, however, the victories were anything but certain until the final buzzer went.
On Friday night, the Warriors mounted what they described on their Twitter account as “#greasy 4-3 come from behind win.”
Coach Joe Kuhar said the team was down 1-0 after the first and still down 1-0 after the second before the Warriors got things in gear in the third to pull out the win.
“We just got a little sloppy in our play,” he said. “At the end of the day, we finally worked our systems continuously, and we wore the other team down.”
He added there were half a dozen good scoring opportunities during the first couple of period, but shots missed by inches.
“We had probably five or six shots that hit the crossbar or hit the post, so it could easily have gone the other way earlier in the game,” he said.
Saturday night’s game went the opposite way — Westlock won it in the first two periods, despite a disappointing third period that saw the Rams outscore the Warriors by a wide margin.
The game was 7-2 going into the third period, and it all began to fall apart a bit at the 10-minute mark. After the Warriors scored their eighth goal of the game, the Rams found the back of the net four times in relatively quick succession — something that obviously put the Warriors on edge a bit.
At the end of the day, however, coming out of the weekend with two more notches in the win column puts the Warriors right up near the top of the standings.
“That’s huge; another couple of wins puts us in a really good position to keep up with the other top teams of Devon and Morinville, and keep us in the hunt for where we want to be,” Kuhar said.
A Friday-night home game against Slave Lake this weekend has been postponed due to a scheduling conflict at the Spirit Centre, but Kuhar said that will give the Warriors more time to focus on what promises to be an exciting game in Morinville against the first-place Kings.
“That will be a huge test,” he said. “We’ll be playing for first place, for sure.”
The league standings after last weekend’s games were unclear as of press time as results hadn’t all been submitted to the league website.
Kuhar said he’s confident that match will go well for Westlock, considering they’ll be at full strength with four strong offensive lines on the bench.
“We’ll have all our key guys in our lineup,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll come out with a ‘W.’”
