The Start of the Journey

After sailing to three consecutive Minnesota AA State Championships, Minnetonka girls’ hockey has built a tradition of success and this year we had a lot to live up to.

This coming season, however, we entered uncharted waters. Regrouping after the graduation of 12 seniors, we featured a lot of new faces as my fellow captains and I led a crew of younger and less experienced players.

This was not going to stop us though.

               At the beginning of the season my fellow captions and I sat down our new team and explained to them, “That it doesn’t matter that we lost all those players, we are still going to play Minnetonka Hockey and work our butts to get better every day. We might not be the most skilled team out there, but we will be the hardest working team and the most frustrating opponent to play against.” This ended up being our motto for the rest of the year. We made sure that every practice and every game we gave it everything we had. And when we didn’t live up to our potential we would get punished for it by skating. Since hockey is a team sport our coaches would even skate with us.

Also at the beginning of the year, our head coach EJ asked everyone on the team to write a team goal on a sheet of paper and the most popular goal would be our team’s goal for the entire year. Our goal was to make it to state, which means we would have to win our section 6AA tournament. This goal was written on our white board so we could see it every day when we were working towards it.

               As the year progressed we made prominent steps forward, but also several times we took steps backwards by either playing down to our opponent’s level or not being mentally there during practice or a game. This seemed to be a continuing thing for our team especially towards the end of the year when we were so close to sections. EJ was concerned that we wouldn’t even pass through the first round of sections if this kept happening so he asked us captains to talk to the team to figure out why this keeps happening and to motivate the team. Frankly I was concerned with the same thing.

So we brought everyone together for a team meeting before the start of sections. Sydney Baldwin, one of the captains, explained to the younger girls that “sections isn’t going to be an easy walk through for those of you who think that. We can’t just turn on and off playing our best. Many of you might be thinking that since we have won the past three years, we are bound to win again, but that isn’t true. This is a new year and we haven’t won anything yet. The trophy is up in the air just like the games. So I want you to ask yourselves, have you been doing everything you could up to this point to reach our team goal? And if not what are you going to change to that to a yes?” We left the meeting at this.