Returning players and hopeful rookies play at the West Central Events Centre in the evening on Sept. 1 during a fall training camp for the Iron Horse Kindersley Klippers. Team Green ended up winning the game over Team Red, and the two teams returned to the ice to wrap up the three-day camp on Sept. 2. The team played several scrimmages and two full games on the weekend.
Kenneth Brown
of The Clarion
The Iron Horse Kindersley Klippers have played their first preseason game of the year after a weekend of scrimmages and games at the team’s fall camp.
The Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League team’s training camp for the 2018-19 season was held over three days this past weekend from Aug. 31 to Sept. 2 at the West Central Events Centre. The team had 45-minute scrimmages Friday night and Saturday morning before splitting players into two teams for games on Saturday night and Sunday morning.
There was also a parent meeting on Saturday afternoon in the curling rink lounge. The Klippers travelled to North Battleford last night for a preseason game against their rival Stars. The Klippers shut out the Stars by a score of 3-0.
The team initially planned to have three smaller teams play four sets of 45-minute scrimmages on Friday and Saturday nights and on Saturday and Sunday mornings, but the plan was later changed to have two larger teams play two full games to finish the camp.
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Coach Clayton Jardine said all of the guys at camp played in every scrimmage and game, and then 17 of the 46 players at the camp were let go after the game on Sunday morning. The team had 29 players going into Monday’s game.
The coach said the team will carry between 23 to 25 players once the roster is finalized for the season, but the roster has to be cut to a maximum of 23 players by Dec. 1 to satisfy a league requirement. Jardine, who watched most of the game on Sunday morning alone in the press box high above the ice, said the camp went well.
“I think things went pretty smoothly,” he said, noting that the change from scrimmages to start the weekend to full games to end the camp helped him as a new, first-year head coach of the team. “Overall, I was very happy with the main camp and how it went.”
He noted that he wanted to get a look at the players in different situations, so they were given a lot of ice time in the scrimmages and he got to see how they looked while playing in three full periods of game action.
The Klippers head into the season with 16 returning players from last year’s team, so the team is going to carry seven rookies on the roster. There were five goalies at camp this past weekend. The coach said he liked what he saw from the team’s veterans and goalies during the three-day camp.
“I was very impressed with all of our veterans,” he said, recognizing that the core group of returning players had a strong presence at camp and they all showed good leadership on the ice. “We have very good goaltending as well.”
Justen Close, who is pegged to be the team’s starting goalie, is coming off a year when he was named the league’s top goalie. Jardine said the team will have a boost on defence with a returning Brendon Borbely, who was traded earlier in the summer for a pair of players from Drumheller.
The team traded Borbely for Nate and Clay Keeley, twins with more than 200 combined games in the AJHL. Jardine said the team acquired Borbely from the Dragons for a player development fee. The Keeley twins were both at camp, the coach said.
He noted that the team’s rookies, a group that includes Kindersley’s Damon McKenzie, all did well at camp and he believes the Keeley brothers will help the team this season. He said it is going to be difficult to make the final cuts, but it is a good problem to for him to have. He said the team got good support over the three-day camp, and he looks forward to getting the season started.
In the win on Monday, the coach said he played six returning players and the rest of the lineup consisted of first-year players including McKenzie and Jaxon Georget of Kindersley. The team’s two returning goalies also suited up for the game.
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