If you were looking to get a gift for Estevan Power Tech Bear Cats forward Kelsey Pastachak, don’t get her a hat: on Sunday, she got one.
Pastachak scored three goals against the Notre Dame Hounds in a 5-3 win for the midget AA Bear Cats, who seemed to get back on the winning offensive track after having trouble scoring against some of the South Saskatchewan Female Hockey League’s Regina teams lately.
“We’re getting better,” said Bear Cats head coach Trevor Morrison, whose team outshot the Hounds 59-13 and outchanced them by a similar margin. “We need to have a better net presence. We have 60 shots, sure we had five goals, but we had 70 shots in the past two games and we had one goal. We’re getting a lot of shots from the outside. We’re shooting a lot and there’s no rebound.”
Getting the second chances at the net was something the Bear Cats had struggles with again Sunday.
“We’re playing on the outside of the game instead of the inside of the game,” he said, adding that there have been a couple more players coming onto the team in recent weeks.
‘We’ve got some chemistry we’ve got to get figured out, and maybe some different line combinations is what we need but we need to be hungrier,” Morrison said. “We need to get hungry for the puck. We need to go into the dirty zone. There’s no contact in girls’ hockey but it’s still physical in front of the net. We need to put in some net presence and I thought it was better (Sunday).”
Jasynn Montayne scored the Bear Cats’ other goals. Devan Fayle stopped 10 shots in the Estevan net.
“We need to get some more offensive awareness and I think we’ll start to put more pucks in the net,” Morrison said.
The Bear Cats played Wednesday in a score that was unavailable at press time, and also travelled to Regina Sunday to play the Ravens (16-1-3). They don’t play at home until their last two games of the season Feb. 9-10 against the Swift Current Broncos (12-5-4).
