DIDSBURY – The Mountainview Colts' 2017-18 season is now in the books. Despite having a young team, with only two 21-year-old players on the roster, the Colts made it to the second round of the Heritage League playoffs before losing to top seeded Red Deer.
First-year head coach Michael Galye said overall he is quite pleased with the results of his first season at the helm with the Colts.
"Red Deer is a good team," said Galye. "They should be the favourites to win it all again I think. We lost the first one, won the second and then took them to four. They have more offence, more skill set. It would've been great to beat them but it would've taken a bit of a miracle."
Galye said that at the beginning of the year the goal was for the team to get to play .500 hockey by the end.
"That's where we ended," he said. "And we wanted to get to the playoffs and make a bit of a push. Stettler was a good first-round series. The boys had to work hard. It was two evenly matched teams."
After two years as an assistant head coach under Gord Olson, Galye took over the reins this season with a young, defensive-minded team.
The previous season the Colts fell in the North Division final (league semifinal) to Red Deer four games to three after finishing first in the regular season with a 29-win, 6-loss and 3-overtime loss record.
In 2015-16 the Colts were crowned Heritage League champions after beating Cochrane four games to two in the final series.
"It was a young team," Galye said of this year's team. "We knew that. We had a lot of young guys. It was kind of a new beginning for the Colts. It'll take a few years to get the skill set back. Hopefully some of the young guys will stick around for a few seasons and put together a core group to build around."
One of the challenges with a young team is that players will often move up and play at the Junior A level, he said
"Some of those guys are now good enough and they'll move on to the next level," he said. "It looks good for the team and the coaching staff to develop young players and have them move on to the next level. We've done our job. But it also makes it hard to stay competitive in the Junior B league when you're constantly rebuilding your base."
Galye said that despite that, they are hoping to return most of their players next year.
"That would be the goal," he said. "We have a good nucleus of guys, I think, will be back. Out of that bunch are we going to be offensive? It'll take some time to develop on offence. We're going to need some of the young guys to mature a couple of years in the league before we really see them step up to the challenge.
"That's really what the Heritage League is about: teams that can keep guys together for two or three years and then when they start turning 20-21 that's when you see success. You're older, stronger, you've played in the league and know how to compete. All year we struggled with our compete factor and it all stems back to guys not being mature enough to know what it takes to compete.
"Guys that are 16 to 17 years old playing against guys that are 20-21 – that's a big difference. They're just that much better at 20-21. I don't care who you are. They're bigger, stronger, faster, they understand the game more, they're more mature. It'll take a year to two to get back on track to compete for a championship but I think it's do-able with the nucleus we have."
The only 21-year-olds on the Colts' roster were top scorer and captain Colton Anderson and goalie Thomas Della Siega, who joined the team midway through the season. Anderson led the team with 70 points in 36 games and set a league scoring record for most points with 308 over six seasons with Mountainview.
"Colton has always put up numbers every year he's played," he said. "Even as a 16- and 17-year-old he was putting up 40 to 50 points. He surrounded himself with quality players over the years. This year was a big challenge for him to step up to the plate and be a leader.
"I'm pretty proud of him for doing that. He was always around players that brought out the best in him, and this year he had to bring out the best in other players."
Anderson was a true leader both on and off the ice for the Colts, he said.
"Moving forward for him as a leader and mentor type of role, I think he did a great job," he said. "Hopefully, a life skill was built from that to compete and get the most of people as he moves on to future endeavours."
Galye expects that next year's Colts team will still be fairly young with plenty to learn.
"It'll be the same type of structured team," he said. "We'll have to look at defence first and try to chip away at teams. We're not going to run guys out of the rink by outscoring them. We're not going to score seven or eight goals like we have in past years.
"It'll be back to the same structure, same drawing board: defence first, tight neutral zone, tight defensive zone; chip away at teams as we go. That was how we were successful early in the season but we kind of got away from it in the middle of the season."
The team's struggles in November and December were due to a "lack of compete," he said.
"I don't know why, whether it was guys got tired or what happened," he said. "Maybe other things. That was when we slid. It wasn't that we were out of hockey games. We lost a lot of 3 - 2 and 4 - 3 games. It boils down to it was a maturity thing: guys got burnt out, tired. We lost the knack to compete.
"Playing at junior you need to come ready to play every game and put it on the line every game. That's just how the game's played."
Galye is unsure of whether he will return to the helm with the Colts. He told the Gazette he would give it some time to consider his options with coaching and whether he leaves the area for work opportunities.
"We'll take some time to chew on it," he said. "Take it one day at a time for a few months and feel it out. We haven't decided that as of yet."
Galye said whether or not he coaches, the Colts have a solid nucleus in place for the future.
"The core is there," he said. "We've established a bit of a framework there for the team over the last few years. I came in a couple of years ago and helped out Gord when we went to the championship and last season we had good success. This year for a rebuild, I thought we did pretty well.
"The nucleus is there. We're just going to have to keep chipping away at it and adding some key role players as we move forward."
