Successful Junior Camps set tone for upcoming competition cycle 

Nationwide Junior Males’s and Girls’s camps run at UBC 

It was an action-packed week on the UBC campus in Vancouver, BC as each the lads’s and ladies’s junior nationwide packages had been on the town for coaching camps.  

The junior males’s camp ran from Monday to Wednesday and consisted of bodily testing, technical classes and a three-game intra-squad scrimmage. The ladies’s camp is operating Thursday-Sunday and can comply with an identical construction. Each groups had roughly 40 athletes in attendance. 

On the lads’s aspect, most of the core returning gamers have performed in two Junior Pan American Championships (together with final yr in Surrey), and a Junior World Cup. It was a really younger cohort after they started this construct and now have upwards of 25-30 junior worldwide caps to their identify.  

In response to Geoff Matthews, head coach of the Junior Nationwide Workforce, this expertise is important, not just for success at this degree however trying ahead to the senior nationwide workforce as nicely. 

Matthews has stewarded this program over the previous a number of years and has expertise on the Youth Olympics as nicely. He’s labored with many of those athletes since they had been 15-16 years previous. He’s trying ahead to the upcoming competitors cycle together with the Junior Pan American Video games in August and the Junior World Cup in December. 

On the ladies’s aspect, many of those athletes have come by means of Area Hockey Canada’s youth improvement system and have been on one, if not two youth excursions previously two years, exposing them to worldwide competitors. Having that pathway has allowed athletes to safe worldwide matches earlier than making the leap to the junior nationwide workforce program. The ladies’s workforce will even return a number of athletes from final yr’s Junior Pan Ams. The pipeline pathway is about up in such a approach that athletes have worldwide competitors each step of the best way main towards the opportunity of being chosen for the senior nationwide workforce. 

Kyle Marks is the newly minted head coach of the Junior Nationwide Workforce. He’s formally labored within the NextGen setting as an assistant, as a coach on youth excursions and within the day by day coaching setting for a number of years. He is aware of and has scouted many of those athletes, however this week is the primary time he’s actually seen the entire group collectively. He stated he’s trying ahead to the competitors cycle and to construct a very robust workforce.  

From this occasion, the squad will proceed to maneuver ahead with competitors rosters being shaped from this group heading to the Junior Pan American Video games in August and the Junior World Cup in December.