My name is Ashten Sinclair and I am a third year defensemen for the Weyburn Gold Wings, in my Grade 12 year. I live with the head coach Chad Kish, his wife Carol Anderson and my roommate Madison Solie.
I am originally from Limerick. October was an exciting month; although not as busy as we it usually is for us. Everyone was excited to start getting at it with the league. We started our league play in Prince Albert on October 4 and 5 coming home with a win and a loss. Janissa Cooley, one of our rookie forwards was injured in these games and had to sit out two weeks until she got back on the ice. After the loss we had a good week of practice, trying to improve on what we had seen went wrong.
Everyone was pretty excited about our home opener on October 10 against the Saskatoon Stars. This was a close game, and we battled hard and kept up to speed with this fast team, but ended up losing in a close 2-0. The next day didn’t go as planned as we didn’t play our best hockey and were beat 3-0. Madi Solie, and myself suffered from injuries also after the weekend and sat out for the rest of the week.
I returned to practice after five days off and Madi returned after about 10 days. Fortunately for us, we had a large break before we started playing games again and gave us all time to get healthy. We tweaked things from what we had saw on the video we collected, skated plenty to keep in shape and made sure to get a few team workouts at Olympia Fitness with our trainers. Excitement came in the middle of the month when we received a new player. Maeve McGauley from Wilcox was another Grade 12 player that was happy to become a new addition to the team.
She is a great player, and an even better teammate as she fits right in with everyone on the Gold Wings! Only having two more games for the month, both being Wednesday nights. On October 21 we played Notre Dame, and came out successful with a 3-1 win. We then played again on October 28 against Regina and unfortunately lost 2-0. Practice was kept upbeat and workouts were kept intense. We all feel a little frustrated with the losses we have, but it fuels us and makes us want to work harder.
With no games on the weekends, two of the weekends we were allowed to go home and spend time with our families. One of the weekends was spent as a team on a trip to Regina to go shopping and watch the female Regina Cougars play. A few of the Gold Wing alumni play on the team so we looked forward to seeing them again! We are spending lots of time together as a team, we volunteer with Mike Rooney to help run practices for kids and participated/volunteered at communithon. We are all bonding closely as a team, and are very excited for the month of November to start!
