OC hockey coaches going to Winter Games

Two coaches from Olds College will be behind the benches for girls' hockey teams at the upcoming Alberta Winter Games.

Chris Leeming, a new Olds resident and head coach of women's hockey at the college, and Allyson Bendfeld, an Innisfail resident and the assistant coach, are volunteering as head coaches at the Games in Fort McMurray Feb. 16-19.

Leeming, who is in his first season at Olds College, said he volunteered in part to meet people and learn about the Alberta hockey scene. He's originally from Ontario and just moved to Alberta at the end of the summer.

"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.

Bendfeld is in her third year of coaching at Olds College, and has been coaching for about 15 years. She'll head up the Zone 2 team's coaching staff, and is 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.

"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.

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.