3-1 in NETHC

Coming into this weekend (11/18-11/19), I was totally wiped out. It's been more than six weeks since I've had a single day off from work or practice. Not to mention, we had an exhausting week in Quebec City with three games and a lot of travel, and then I had to go to work all week.

That being said, as always, I was looking forward to the games this weekend. Especially since I figured we would blow away all of these teams and have a nice confidence booster going into our (much-deserved) Thanksgiving break.

Just as a reminder, these games are part of the NETHC, that is what I like to call our "practice" league. These games are against younger or less experienced teams, so it gives us a chance to get playing experience for our newer members of the team.

*Game 1- USA vs. Laurier* (Saturday)
This game was against Laurier Senior team, I have no idea where they come from, but they speak English. We didn't know anything about them coming into this game, but right away it was clear that we should dominate them. We scored a few goals right off the bat after using a really aggressive high defense to force them to make turnovers. It worked well and we were up by almost ten going into the second half. This is where we should have pulled away for a really big win, but we got sloppy and only won by 17.
Final score:USA 32, Laurier 15

*Game 2- USA vs. Chaudiere* (Saturday)
This was another game where we should have dominated. They were the junior team of the team we played in Quebec City last week. We knew their style and also recognized a few of the players that we saw last weekend. We were up by nearly 10 at the end of the first half and could have probably won by 20, but again we got sloppy in the second half and never really pulled ahead. We need to work on this!
Final score:USA 32, Chaudiere 22

*Game 3- USA vs. Sherbrooke* (Sunday)
I'm not going to lie, I was pretty tired when we had to meet at the gym at 8:00am to prepare for two more games! I stayed until 10pm the night before working the tables for the games after us, and I was beat. Thankfully we had an hour to get our minds and bodies warmed up before we had to play, and thankfully I had watched this team play the night before so I had some ideas about what to expect.

I scored the first goal of the game and we came out pretty strong as a team in the beginning. To be honest, looking back all of the games are starting to run together. We played pretty well, but we could have probably won by more. It seems to be a trend. We should have definitely scored more than 24 goals.
Final score:USA 24, Chaudiere 11

*Game 4- USA vs. Laval* (Sunday)
This was definitely the best team of the weekend, although they lost to Chaudiere the night before by three points, which was kind of surprising. We were expecting to run a lot, and knew we had to play good defense, but I think the results of this game took everyone by surprise.

Sure we were all tired after three games, but there was no excuse for us losing the game the way we did. In fact, at half time we were winning 17-7. Then something happened, the game got dirty, and we started making mistakes. We had a couple of two-minute penalties and way too many turnovers. Defensively we started to break down and let them score. I wish I could understand exactly what happened, but it was ugly.
Final score:USA 24, Laval 26


In my mind there is no reason whatsoever we should have lost this game. But I guess we have to experience things like this in order to figure out what we need to work on. We've overcome a big obstacle by learning how to come out strong in the beginning, but we really need to focus on not only keeping our lead, but pulling ahead even more in the second half. We also need to get better at dealing with high pressure situations. With four minutes left to go, we were down by two. There were several opportunities for us to come ahead in the last minutes of the game, but we choked.

We've got some work to do, but hopefully we're making progress. These were the last games before we go to Sweden, so I hope we can remember what we need to do better so we can make the most of our preparation tour in December.