Staff
It was a tale of two very different hockey games.
After trading goals at a breakneck pace with Dryden in their preliminary-round match-up, the Fort Frances Atom ‘AA’ Snipers had only one bullet pierce the host squad’s armour with the championship on the line.
Thankfully for them, it was all they needed.
Eric Matthews provided all the offence for his team early in the third period while Parker Orchard put up an impenetrable wall between the pipes to backstop the Snipers to a 1-0 victory in the tourney final Sunday.
The two squads had duelled to a 7-7 draw in their tournament opener against each other, but it was a battle of goalies rather than goals which provided the backdrop for the gold-medal confrontation in the Snipers’ first tournament of the season.
“The guys played really well considering we haven’t been together much the last three weeks due to so many guys being sick,” said Snipers’ coach Brent Tookenay.
“We had two good games against Dryden.
“We were a little tired in the first couple of periods [of the final] because it was our fourth game in 36 hours,” Tookenay noted. “But we got them pumped up for the third, and they came out and got that early goal.”
The decisive marker was a display of good timing on Matthews’ part. The defenceman made the right decision to move in from the point and unleash a rocket that beat the Dryden netminder to the glove side.
Orchard, meanwhile, was solid as a rock throughout the game—no more so than in the dying stages when the Snipers found themselves in a mess of penalty trouble.
“We took two penalties in the final minute and we’re basically facing a 6-on-3 against us for the last 50 seconds,” Tookenay recalled in describing the frenzied finish in the Fort Frances end of the ice created by the two-man advantage for Dryden, which became three once the host side yanked its goalie.
The Snipers are a team built on a foundation of differing experience levels—something which paid off well over the weekend.
“We’ve got five guys back from last year and five other second-year Atom players that weren’t with us last year, as well as six first-year Atoms,” Tookenay explained.
The Snipers next head to Kenora for a tournament in two weeks.
