U15B Win it all. Bluewater CHAMPIONS
On March 18, 2025, this LaSalle Sabres Group won the 2025 Bluewater League. The championship guarantees them a spot in the final OMHA Red Hats tournament. The squad went undefeated throughout the playoffs and swept the Talbot Trail Blazers in two hard fought games, 3-0 and 2-1. This group of young men bonded early in the year, brought an open mind to learn new things. The team was picked on 5 principles - SMART, TOUGH, FAST, DISCIPLINE with CHARACTER. They were taught to play with High Energy, Max Effort and to Play Inspired Hockey. When all of this comes together, you have confident players. When you have confident players they will play fast, when you have fast players you win more games, Why? because that's science.
Just to recap the amazing run this season.
The regular season saw the team go 16-2 to capture the regular season title.
The first tournament of the year was in Belle River where we finished third place with a shoot out victory. This is when we knew we had something special going. We had a few practices together and went back to basics because of the variety of players we had. We had kids who have never played travel hockey before, could barely skate but had grit, took on 4 young guns with a tremendous amount of potential, we had some old veterans of travel and brought them out of retirement - basically, we got the band back together. We had 4 AP's who joined our practices and played some important games for us.
The second tournament had us travel to Notre Dame for the south bend Irish cup. We won that tournament.
The third tournament had us travel to St. Thomas for the Boston Pizza Cup and we played some great tough games against good competition. This is where we learned to play a better Neutral Zone transition game and stay out of the penalty box.
The fourth tournament was the Chatham Silver stick and although we didn't fulfill our expectations to win it, we learned to be humble in defeat and gracious when winning. All life lessons.
The fifth tournament, we travelled all the way to Detroit, Michigan. We wanted to play some American AA teams to ramp up our competitive fire before the Bluewater Playoffs and to learn some more tactics. Unbeknownst to the coaching staff, we didn't just show up, we showed out. We skated hard, fast, and made big plays to go to the finals. We finished in second place.
We went undefeated in the round robin play of the Bluewater playoffs and matched up against the other undefeated team - Talbot Trailblazers. We finished this amazing run off going 11-0-3.
After a hard fought series, we emerged victorious and captured the Bluewater Championship. We did this all by staying with the process. We played each kid, no one sat, rolled the lines as usual so that they could all gain the experience in situational hockey and they all contributed to the overall team success throughout the whole year. That's culture!
Great work to all and thank you to our supporters, it's only been about 7 years in the making!
The best is yet to come!
