Under-11 Wolves come home with OMHA silver

The Niagara-on-the-Lake Wolves Under-11 hockey team staked their claim last week in Barrie as one of the top two Tier One teams in the province. The silver medallists drove home to NOTL with an Ontario Minor Hockey Association (OMHA) Finalists banner that will soon be proudly hung at their home arena in Virgil. 

“I’m so proud of these kids,” raves head coach Joe Pagnotta. “They were so resilient and fought hard all year. They were disappointed they didn’t win gold, but I told them to seize the moment, that these opportunities don’t come around often. It’s going to be great to hang that banner in the arena.”

The eight teams who qualified for the tournament began their quest for the title on Good Friday. It actually turned out to be a great Friday for the Wolves, who won both of their games that day. 

The morning began with a 3-0 win over the Mount Brydges Cougars on the strength of goals by Luke Simpson, James Froese and Ben Bayne and strong goaltending from Mason Nichols, who was named player of the game for his shutout performance. Nichols was between the pipes for all five games the Wolves played over the three-day weekend.

Game two in pool play came later Friday afternoon, when the Wolves faced the Midland Centennials. Earlier this season NOTL and Midland exchanged wins in each other’s tournaments, so Friday’s OMHA match was a bit of a tie-breaker for bragging rights. 

The two teams skated through a scoreless first period before Midland broke the deadlock with the game’s first goal 1:27 into the second. But Simpson responded eight minutes later off his own rebound to tie it up. 

The “second and third period team,” as often described to The Local by Pagnotta this year, lived up to that billing, exploding for three goals in the third from Froese, Eli Perng and August Felice for a 4-1 victory. 

“They were convincing wins, but both games were actually much closer than the scores show,” Pagnotta says. “All the teams that made it to the OMHAs are really good teams. Anybody could have won any of the games.” 

The Wolves finished the day with a 2-0 record and a guaranteed spot in the semi-finals Sunday. All that was left before that was to face the similarly 2-0 Saugeen Shores Storm Saturday to see who would lay claim to first place in their four-team pool. 

Pagnotta says the players and their families gathered Friday night for a team dinner at a Barrie restaurant, and Saturday morning some of them visited Innisfil Beach for a shoreline stroll. 

The Wolves faced off against the Storm at 2:30 p.m. that day and came out on the losing end of a 6-0 decision. Neither team scored during the first period, but Saugeen Shores tallied three each in the second and third to claim top spot in their pool. 

Perhaps the Wolves were overconfident after the big day Friday, maybe it was too much downtime between games for the nine- and 10-year-olds, or it could have been the knowledge that they had already made it to the semi-finals, so they may not have felt the urgency to win.

“They had a couple of really good skaters,” Pagnotta says of the Storm. “But we didn’t play very well. We didn’t show a lot of fight later on during that game, and we came up short. It was our weakest game of the tournament.”

Making lemonade out of lemons, Pagnotta and fellow coaches Glen Davis, Derek Nichols and Sean Simpson turned the loss into a coachable moment.

“We talked to the kids about how important it is to follow the game plan,” Pagnotta explains. “Going into the semis we were hoping we could use this to get them to buy into what we were telling them to do. And they did.”

For Sunday’s semi-final game they drew the Tillsonburg Tornadoes, who finished first in their own pool. The Wolves came out on top that morning with a thrilling 2-1 double overtime victory to punch their ticket into the championship game. 

It was another scoreless first period for both teams, and the fourth straight for NOTL. But Ben Bayne managed to get the Wolves on the board in the final minute of the second period.

The Wolves celebrated their second goal of the game early in the third period, but the referees waved it off, claiming the whistle had been blown before the puck had crossed the goal line. 

Then, with under seven minutes left to play, one of the Wolves tried to win the puck in the NOTL zone, but it caromed off the end boards and came out right in front of Nichols. The Storm knocked it in to tie the game. 

It was Simpson, the same player whose shootout goal sealed the Niagara District Hockey League championship for the team just over a week prior, who was again the hero, netting the winning goal with 6:47 left in the second overtime period. 

“Mason made some great saves,” Pagnotta says. “The kids bought into everything we asked of them and they played as a team, not as individuals, which they did late in game three. They were so deserving of the semi-final win regardless of how it happened.”

Earlier Sunday morning the Strathroy Junior Rockets had beaten Saugeen Shores 6-2 in the other semi-final, meaning NOTL would face the Rockets at 1 p.m. 

The Rockets went up 1-0 late in the first period, then scored two more in the first five minutes of the second before James Froese got NOTL on the scoreboard with 7:24 remaining. But Strathroy added two more just seven seconds apart to take a 5-1 lead. NOTL closed the gap a bit with a power play goal with 1:39 remaining in the second. 

The Wolves shut down the potent Rockets’ offence for much of the third, but couldn’t score another goal, and gave up a final one to Strathroy, losing the game 6-2 but capturing the silver medal. 

“We made some costly errors and got down a couple of goals,” Pagnotta recalls. “We kept grinding, and most of the kids kept fighting until the end, though some were playing in panic mode. But right up to our last shift they went out and took some final attempts on the Strathroy goalie.”

Pagnotta, a board member with the NOTL Minor Hockey Association, reiterates his opinion that the team has nothing to be disappointed about after capturing the silver medal. 

“It’s a huge accomplishment,” he states. “I’ve been involved with the club for at least six or seven years, and I don’t remember any team winning a medal at the OMHAs in that time. Most kids in this province will never have an opportunity to even make it to the OMHAs, let alone compete for a gold medal.”

Pagnotta continues, “these guys are going to have a banner raised in the arena and be able to stare up at it for the rest of their lives. They should be so proud of themselves.”