What a Team, What a Community

As I ride the bus on our journey home i am thinking what a journey it has been. I cannot say enough how honored I am coaching at Dakota College at Bottineau. Now in my 15th season I have seen many players come and go and many teams better than others. Never before though have I been blown away by the support we have received from our community. It is such a great feeling that the town and school is so proud of Lumberjack Hockey. It is very humbling and greatly appreciated. All you have to do is look at the past 5 seasons and realize that we struggled. I am not going to lie as it felt like we were never going to get here again. The thing that kept it going was we had some very good people who were a part of Lumberjack Hockey. And they kept me motivated to turn the ship around, to work harder to make our program better. Then last March the "RULE" got changed. Now we can have more foreign players. What a difference a year makes. We have such good people here now and such a TEAM in every sense of the word. We had 2 goalies who started each game in the National Tournament. I believe we had 8 different goal scorers in the two games, we had everyone playing together and we had everyone believe that we could do this.  We also had tremendous support including a group of students and Michelle Davis who drove from Bottineau to be a part of it. They will drive over 3000 miles total just to be there. We had family there to support us. We had 2 people from NYC area who were a part of the Annies House building to come watch us. (Thank you Tony and Rob) We had Dano Fagerland there to make sure there were coverage as well as other jobs. Including taping the game to be put on Periscope which had over 2000 hits. We had the radio station SUNY 101.9 cover the games. We had elementary students send us signs and sending us off while we left town also middle and Jr. High students. We had one little girl send us 7 boxes of girl scout cookies. We had our Adopt a Jack families go above and beyond what they do. We had Zelda line us meals on the way out there so we could get some meals through Sodexho. We had people who sent us many donations to help us get out there. It goes on and on and on and I cannot thank everyone enough.  I think we tried to do our best to make Bottineau proud and I think we did that. We did that on and off the ice. It is almost supper time but I want to tell everyone from Bottineau, DCB, ND, Canada, Alumni and anyone I missed THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart as this was a very great time to be a Lumberjack. I am very blessed to be the Coach of these 23 young men and this will be a team that I will never forget.

PS: Thanks to my family for all the support. I love you guys!

LONG LIVE THOSE LUMBERJACKS

February 1

Well it was good to get back into the win column as we swept Finlandia JV on the weekend after dropping 3 games in a row to Williston (2) and Minot (1) the previous week. On Saturday night we scored 5 goals in the first period and dominated the game and finished with a 10-1 score. It was a good game for us as we were burying chances and flying. We also stayed out of the penalty box so that was a good sign. On Sunday we prevailed 3-2 in a much better game. We knew Finlandia would play better as it was there first game back after the break as well as the travel from the UP in Michigan. They did play better and we played well too so it was a entertaining game. We need to hit the net more as Sunday we missed some grade A scoring chances as we did not hit the net. Unfortunately we had a few injuries on the weekend, but other than that it was a good weekend. 

Up Next is Minot State on Friday night 7:30 PM in the Lumberdome. See you there!

LLTL