wildcats

The Swift Current Diamond Energy Wildcats hit a bit of a lull in their recent upswing with a loss and a shootout win against Melville in female Midget AAA hockey last weekend.

The Wildcats had won five straight games before that, but all of them had been on home ice. Coach Terry Pavely knows they have to get better on the road to move up in the standings. They also can't afford to take teams bellow them lightly.

"We had kind of been playing well against good teams," Pavely said. "We looked at the standings, saw a team that was near the bottom and thought it was going to be an easier weekend for us. In our league there are no easy weekends. A lot of teams are beating a lot of different teams."

The 3rd and 6th place teams in the league are separated by only 3 points.

After a poor effort in a 4-1 loss to Melville on Saturday, the Wildcats rebounded with a 2-1 shootout win on Sunday.

"The first day there was nobody in our lineup we felt really competed as hard as they could," Pavely said. "Sunday we worked really hard, we competed hard. We didn't execute like we wanted to, but we did compete hard and we can live with that."

"We tended to make the easy plays difficult. We'd win a face-off in the neutral zone and we'd throw in our defencemen's feet... when we were trying to off the boards we never went high off the boards."

The Wildcats are back on home ice this weekend against Prince Albert. Swift Current is undefated at Fairview West Arena in regular season play.

"Tied with them in the standings," Pavely said. "It's going to be a tough weekend. They're a good hockey team. They've got very good goaltending in Jessica Vance so getting back to traffic in front of the net is going to be essential for us. We're going to have to make life tough for her."

They other area we really are going to have to improve is our netural ice game. When we get the puck we're not quite doing a good enough job of getting open... we're just going to work on being a better forechecking team in the neutral zone."

You can catch the Wildcats and Bears on Saturday at 7:45pm at Fairview West Arena. They play again at 2pm on Sunday.