INNISFAIL – An Innisfail resident and experienced hockey coach will be behind the bench of a team at the Alberta Winter Games.
Allyson Bendfeld, an Innisfail resident and assistant coach of the Olds College women’s hockey team, is volunteering as a head coach of the Zone 2 female hockey squad at the Games in February.
She’ll possibly get the chance to face off against colleague Chris Leeming, the head coach of the Olds College women’s hockey team. Leeming, an Olds resident, will be the head coach of the Zone 3 team.
Bendfeld is in her third year of coaching at Olds College, and has been coaching for about 15 years. She’s an experienced volunteer with coaching through Hockey Alberta.
"I’ve volunteered with Hockey Alberta for most of that 15 years that I’ve been coaching,” Bendfeld said. That volunteering has ranged from coaching, to helping out with evaluation camps, to roles like the one she’ll undertake for the under-18 female Team Alberta in 2019 at the Canada Winter Games as the video coach. The video coach appointment was just announced earlier in January.
"I always like the opportunity to be able to do stuff like this, I always find that I learn lots and I find I get to work with different people that have different ways of doing things, which is always nice to get some different ideas,” Bendfeld said, adding that it also gives her an opportunity to have her field evaluation done after completing a high performance coaching clinic this past summer.
She’s lived in the Central Alberta area since 2006, and prior to coaching at Olds College she has coached bantams and midgets in Red Deer, and coached peewees and bantam players in Innisfail before that.
Bendfeld said she coaches mostly to give back to the game she loves, a game she’s played since she was seven.
Leeming, who is in his first season at Olds College, said he volunteered for the Alberta Winter Games in part to meet people and learn about the Alberta hockey scene.
"I’ve been really, really impressed with the level of competition,” he said of his experience so far. He’ll be the head coach of the Zone 3 team. This will be his first time coaching at the Alberta Winter Games.
To become head coaches for the Alberta Winter Games, Leeming and Bendfeld had to apply. Once picked, they had to help select their teams at tryouts. Leeming said it was an interesting process that operated like a draft.
"It was a really thorough process, and I really enjoyed it,” Leeming said.
They’ll each get to undertake the challenge of coaching a team they haven’t coached before, with team members that haven’t played with each other, to try and win a provincial tournament.
"That’s kind of the tricky part about this is we don’t have any practice times,” Leeming said. They’ll have to quickly come together to try and succeed at the Games, which only run for a few days, Feb. 16-19.
Allyson Bendfeld
"I always like the opportunity to be able to do stuff like this, I always find that I learn lots and I find I get to work with different people that have different ways of doing things, which is always nice to get some different ideas."
