U15 Stars Fail to Advance

The Stars/Tigers run to the Austrian U15 Championship came to a screaching halt yesterday afternoon in Vienna when they were defeated 6 - 1 by a more determined and spirited Vienna Jr. Capital team that deserved to move into the final.

The game was not what the Stars expected or wanted and they failed to once again capitalize on their offense in both 5 on 5 and powerplay situations. When Florian Baltram scored late in the first to get them back to 1 - 2 the game could have turned for the better but a weak defensive zone pass gave the Caps the puck and they promptly punished the Stars with the 3 -1 goal. Just a few minutes later a bad angle shot beat the Stars netminder for a 4 - 1 Caps lead and to make matters even worse another lose shot snuck through and gave the Jr. Caps a unsurmountable 5 - 1 lead they would not give up.

The rest of the third period was merely cosmetic as the Stars although working hard, had no chance against a much stronger and energetic Caps group who scored their sixth goal late to add insult to injury and celebrate a stunning victory over a totally demoralized Stars Team.

Coaches Comments:

This is a bitter pill to swallow for the team and the staff as it was not the loss but the way we lost which really hurt. I hope the boys managed to take something from this experience and losing does teach us a lot about ourselves. We were not able to recapture the spirit we had last Sunday and we did not have the energy level needed to compete. The bottom line was the Jr. Caps wanted to win much more than we did and once down we reverted to the old habits we are all trying to get away from. We were weak in almost every aspect of the game and it looked as if we accepted losing too easily.

We are still a good group of players who now should slowly be beginning to unsterstand that good players do not make a good team and that individuals do not win games but teams do. Once we get that lesson into our heads we have the chance to move to the next level which we all want to do.

It is hard to find positives when you come off such a dissapointing loss but we hope that this experience sparks a new begining in the minds of many of our guys who may just hate losing enough now to finally make those changes needed to make them better players and teammates.