The Yorkton UCT Terriers picked up two more wins and four more points in SBAAHL South action this past weekend, first handing the Prairie Storm their first loss of the season in the form of a 6-1 drubbing on Saturday before lambasting the visiting Regina Pat Blues 9-4 on Sunday.
The two wins improve Yorkton’s sparkling record to a league best 14-1-0, good enough for first overall in both the South Division and entire SBAAHL. The Regina Monarchs sit second overall in the South division with a 10-3-2 record for 22 points while the Prairie Storm are third with a 9-1-1 record and 19 points.
Estevan rounds out the Southern top four with an 8-7-0 record and 16 points.
The Sask Valley Vipers, as they have done for the entire season, continue to lead the SBAAHL North with a 12-2-1 record and 25 points, while Prince Albert (9-5-2), North East (9-4-1) and the Saskatoon Stallions (8-5-2) sit two, three and four in the North with 20, 19 and 18 points respectively.
Stopping the Storm
The Prairie Storm came crashing into Yorkton like a category five hurricane, riding the tidal wave of an undefeated 9-0-1 record, only to leave Saskatchewan’s City of Champions with the force of one small cloud just barely drizzling rain thanks to a 6-1 drubbing at the hands of the Yorkton UCT Terriers on Saturday at the Kinsmen Arena.
Three members of the UCT Terriers had a pair of goals in the game with Brett Kemp opening and closing the scoring in the game, picking up his first goal just 21 seconds in the game and recording his second with 4:23 remaining in the third to start up and finish off a 6-1 Yorkton victory.
Sandwiched in between Kemp’s two goals were four other UCT Terrier markers. Defenceman Kaleb Bulych chipped in with his fourth and fifth goals of the campaign while Carson Miller’s two goals and two assists led all UCT Terriers with four points on the night.
League leading scorer Keenan Taphorn didn’t find the back of the net in the game, however he did hit the score sheet three times, assisting on all three second period goals.
Picking up the win between the Yorkton pipes was Nolan Maier, who played just his second regular season game of the year and first at home after nursing a lower body injury that kept him out of the lineup so far this season.
However Maier didn’t look out of place, turning aside 13-of-14 Prairie Storm shots for the win while Riley Christison stopped 25-of-31 Yorkton attempts in the loss.
Following the game, UCT Terrier head coach Graham Garrett credited his team’s improving work ethic, saying, “I thought we played very well. We were able to outwork them and that’s something that we talked about after the Estevan loss.
“We have to be able to work harder than other teams and that’s what we did against the Prairie Storm.”
Garrett also mentioned that it was nice to pick up a regular season win over the Prairie Storm; something they were unable to do last season. “Last year we weren’t able to beat them in the regular season but we were able to make the adjustments we needed to make to be able to beat them in the playoffs,” offered Garrett. “Now this year we’ve made those adjustments before the playoffs so we’re ahead of where we were last year at this time and it’s nice to see guys come out and win a convincing game against a good hockey team.”
Rocking Regina
The Yorkton UCT Terriers were back in action on Sunday, one day after their convincing 6-1 win over the previously undefeated Prairie Storm.
This time the opponents were the 6-6-0 Regina Pat Blues, a .500 team with above .500 heart.
However pure heart cannot defeat pure skill and that was proven on Sunday as the Yorkton UCT Terriers downed the Regina Pat Blues 9-4 in what was one of their worst defensive efforts of the season. “We’re able to score goals when we need to score goals but we’ve got to be able to not give up goals,” said Garrett. “I thought yesterday they were able to get one goal where defensively we kind of lost our assignments, but we played very well defensively after that whereas today I don’t think we played well defensively at any point in the game.”
Of course it’s difficult for a team to put forth a full 60-minute effort day in and day out against teams that are in no way, shape or form as strong as they are, which is something that the UCT Terriers head coach acknowledged post-game. “Unfortunately we play at other teams’ levels sometimes. We don’t play with as much emotion as we should each and every game and the flip side of it is that it’s difficult sometimes to play with that emotion when you’re playing teams that don’t bring enough against you to raise that,” suggested the UCT Terrier bench boss. “It’s tough and we have to address that so it doesn’t become habitual for us to have lazy type games because those are bad habits. You can’t do that against better teams but we might get away with it too often playing some of the teams that we play in our league and we’ve got to make sure that those bad habits don’t become the norm.
“We try to address it day in and day out but sometimes the competition we’re playing isn’t pushing us and making us pay for those mistakes and it’s tough to learn when you’re not getting scored on, giving up chances against or losing hockey games because of your bad habits.”
Scoring for the UCT Terriers in the 9-4 win were league leading scoring Keenan Taphorn with four goals, while singles were added by Carson Miller, Kaeden Taphorn, Ashton Shewchuk, Zach McIntyre and Michael Coleridge.
Carter Lake and Jordan Repsch both picked up two assists in the game while the aforementioned Kaeden Taphorn and Miller also had multi-assist games, Taphorn with two and Miller with three.
Tyson Byman picked up the win in the Yorkton net stopping 9-of-13 Regina shots while Blake Diewold took the loss for the Regina Pat Blues, turning aside 23-of-32 UCT Terrier shots.
Up next
The next action for the Yorkton UCT Terriers (14-1-0) will be this coming weekend when they welcome a pair of Saskatoon teams, the Generals (4-12-1) and Bandits (6-8-3), to town.
The UCT Terriers will host the Generals on Saturday at 4:45p.m. at the Kinsmen Arena while the Bandits will be in town for a 1:30p.m. Sunday afternoon game.
