All And All Good Season For Storm:

This is on the Grande Prairie Storm web site:

ALL AND ALL GOOD SEASON FOR STORM

Thu, Apr 23 2009

By TERRY FARRELLDaily Herald-Tribune Sports Editor

While one final winter storm raged into town last night, Grande Prairie’s winter Storm exited on quite a different note: With a whimper. The Vernon Vipers completed a four-game sweep of the Grande Prairie Storm for the Doyle Cup, last night at the Canada Games Arena, beating them 5-2. The win gives Vernon six Doyle Cup championships – the annual showdown between the top junior teams in Alberta and BC to determine a western representative at the RBC Royal Bank Cup. The Vipers were simply too strong, too deep and too hungry for the Alberta Junior Hockey League champions. “You’ve got to give them a ton of credit – they played fantastic and made it difficult as heck on us,” said Storm coach/GM Mike Vandekamp. “For whatever reason, we haven’t got the answer yet, but we just hit a wall. We were out of gas. “They were just better than we were in the series. It’s disappointing to say, but it‘s the honest truth. They have a heck of a team on their side.” For the second straight game, the Vipers opened the scoring with a short-handed goal – and once again, Connor Jones was the marksman.His twin brother, Kellen, stripped Storm defenceman Matt Williams of the puck, fed Connor in front, who had only Storm goalie Chad Carder to beat. Connor waited for Carder to commit, then deked glove-side for the 1-0 lead. Jones made it 2-0 at the 13-minute mark, redirecting a point shot on a Vernon power play for his second of the night. The entire line of the Jones twins, along with Sahir Gill, were too much for the Storm to handle in the series, particularly Connor. He finished the series with five goals and 10 points to lead all scorers. The entire Storm team had 15 scoring points. “I have to give all the credit to my linemates – I don’t get anything without them,” he said. “The whole team – it was a great team effort. “This (Doyle Cup) is the biggest thing I have ever experienced in my life. I can’t wait to get to Victoria.” The Storm got on the board 86 seconds into the second period, in the most basic of forms: Putting the puck on net. Brendan Turnbull took a shot from an unlikely angle toward Vernon goalie Andrew Hammond, who made the save but could not control the rebound. Doug Reid was parked at the side of the crease and swatted it in for a 2-1 game. Morgan MacLean tied it six minutes later with a snap shot from the slot on a Storm power play. Braden Pimm restored Vernon’s lead midway through the second, catching Carder by surprise with a snap shot from the top of the face-off circle on a lone-man rush. Gill iced the game with a power-play goal, with three minutes to play, taking a cross-crease feed from Connor Jones and tapping it into the wide-open net. Jones completed his hat trick with an empty-netter in the 19th minute. Vernon coach Mark Ferner was surprised at how quickly his team disposed of the AJHL champs. “Absolutely not,” he said, when asked if he envisioned the sweep. “Every series we go into, we are prepared for a long series and we feel like built a hockey team (to withstand) a long series. Obviously this was surprising. We didn’t expect this at all. “But we had tremendous efforts by our group for four games.” Making the achievement even more impressive was that the Vipers did it with virtually no opportunity to scout the Storm.By the time they won their BCHL championship series against Powell River, the Storm had been champions for a week. And with the Storm disposing of Spruce Grove in four straight games, it gave little chance Viper management to send anyone east for observation purposes. It mattered little in the end. “We saw a little bit online, but the one thing about our hockey team is that we don’t worry too much about what other teams do,” said Ferner. “We have a pretty safe system, and the game has been around for way to long for us to try to re-create it.” So, on to Victoria for the Vipers, and a chance at a national championship. Vandekamp would not be surprised to see them succeed in their quest for a third Royal Bank Cup in the 14-year history of the tournament.“I think their chances are exceptional,” he said. “They’ve got, by far, the best structure of any team that we play this year, extremely well coached, obviously. They play hard, have a nice balance of different types of players and they’ve got a great goaltender and by far the biggest and strongest D-corps that we faced, one-through-six. Put it all together and I‘d think their chances are awfully good and we wish them all the best.” As for his team, Vandekamp sees even better things in the future, based on what he saw from his players this season. “We have started a foundation for some success here,” said Vandekamp. “There‘s been quite a culture change with our team and we’re pretty proud of where we’re going with it. Our kids were extremely dedicated this year, both on and off the ice. We knew all along that we didn’t have the perfect template. There (were) some things that we felt were kind of missing within the make-up of our club, and they finally showed through a little bit in this series. But we managed to get a long ways with the group we had and basically it’s all because of the efforts and the sacrifices of the players.” Despite the bitter ending, it was a year of achievement for the Grande Prairie Storm. The franchise set team records for wins and points in the regular season, hoisted the league championship trophy for a second time and boasted numerous scholarships gained for players. “We had a lot of guys that caught the experience of their hockey lives to this point, and maybe their lives in general,” said Vandekamp. “I know they learned a lot and we’re proud of that. That’s what a junior hockey program is supposed to be all about. That’s the type of program that I know first-hand the Vernon Vipers have and other teams around junior hockey that are running good solid programs. It’s all about learning good life lessons and growing up and I think that’s what our kids did this year.”