The Mite A Stars completed their half ice games with a present to the coaches...an all out effort and big win against a resilient Winthrop team. Captain Jonathan Soares' quote to the team, "You'll miss 100% of the shots you never take", was taken to heart by this team and they followed Gretzky's advice to a T. Jonathan, his brother Joseph, Jimmy Driscoll and Abigail Travers came out on fire. Jonathan continues to find his brother with some sweet passes and then hustle back on defense. Joseph knows what to do with those passes and hit the back of the net multiple times today with some excellent work down low. Jimmy showed some great two way play and would score a few goals along with a nice "field" goal from the blue line. Abi's effort on defense would prevent several wide open breakaways as she continues to excel each and every game. Jack Glowacz, brother James, Dion Sacca and Mike Murphy, another formidable line for the Stars, put in some grinding work today as well. Mike was flying around in the corners doing the dirty work to free up the puck for his linemates. James is also a familiar face in the corners, digging hard to work the puck loose. Dion was all over the ice today, chopping at loose pucks also. Jack would benefit from all of this hard work and pop in several goals behind a stunned Winthrop goalie. The next line of Brendan Heffron, Timmy Sullivan, brother Cam and Stevie Migliero showed off some of their finely tuned skill on every shift. Janney to Neely comes to mind when watching Brendan work with Timmy for some sweet passes and multiple goals each. Being classmates and teammates, Stevie and Cam spend a lot of time together. They must work on their X's and O's behind the coaches' backs because they also put on a show together out there. Cam continues his steady two way play. Stevie had a few sweet goals including one top shelf where mama keeps the candy! The goalie never saw that one coming! With the way the Stars played today you'd think it was a lopsided game. Quite the contrary! Winthrop has some great skaters and were relentless in their attack. The action was up and down at points. Along with some stellar plays on defense there was only one thing stopping the score from being fairly even, amazing goaltending by the Stars' netminder, Anthony Grabau. Anthony made several acrobatic saves and stood his ground on tons of tough shots. For Anthony's incredible effort he earned the coveted game puck! This concludes half ice games for the Stars. They started off as a bunch of kids from scattered hockey backgrounds and have gelled into a team and some would say a family. As they make their way into full ice games they know they will need to work together even more so, play their positions and have each others' backs. Next season, some of them will go to Squirts, some will stay in Mites but they will probably never forget their first "real" hockey team. If they continue to work hard for the remainder of the season there will be many awesome memories like today's game stuck in their heads. Santa definitely saw some "nice" things on the ice today and will surely check off everything on the Stars' players' lists.
