It isn’t often a team will put together a season with 40 or more wins in a Western Hockey League season and automatically expect even better results the following campaign, but that’s the situation the Moose Jaw Warriors find themselves in heading into their 2023 training camp.
Sure, they’ll need a few breaks along the way and some players to make jumps in their game, but that’s likely going to be the case for every team in the WHL this season. And as a result, head coach Mark O’Leary is hoping to see some big things from his crew when camp kicks off Thursday morning with the on-ice rookie sessions.
“I think it’s similar to last year where we’re excited about the core that we have,” O’Leary said. “I know it’s a model of ours that we want to draft and develop our own players, it’s something we take pride in, and you look at our returning players, for some guys it’s their fifth year in Moose Jaw. So they’ve grown up together and this is another opportunity to win some hockey games and build off last year’s success.”
The Warriors are coming off their best season since their Scotty Munro Trophy-winning campaign in 2017-18. Their 41-24-0-3 mark was good enough for fourth place in the Eastern Conference, and they’d sweep the Lethbridge Hurricanes in the first round before falling in six to the Winnipeg Ice in the Conference semifinal.
With the majority of their core from that campaign returning, the plan is to take another step forward, and it all begins with the youngsters.
The first two rookie camp practices are at 9 a.m. and 10 a.m.Thursday, followed by main camp practice at 12:30 p.m. and the first rookie camp scrimmage at 4:30 p.m.
“For the 08s coming in, it’ll be the first opportunity for someone like myself to meet some of them, so it’ll be about building those relationships and getting to know them a bit and what they are as players and people as well,” O’Leary said. “Then with the ones coming back, it’s looking for that progression. When you’re dealing with teenage kids, a lot can happen over an off-season and that’s why it’s so exciting, you can see players who just months ago looked completely different.”
One doesn’t have to look very far to see what that looks like in a Moose Jaw Warriors uniform, either -- Justin Almeida put up only 28 points as a 17-year-old in the 2016-17 campaign and one year later was one of the league’s top scorers with 43 goals and 98 points. And a season later, Tristin Langan went from a 40-point player as a 19-year-old to 113 points as an overager, missing the league scoring title by a single point.
“Every year there are guys who take that big leap, whether it’s confidence they built from last year or the work they put in over the summer, you get an opportunity to see guys who had jumped off the page and kind of wow you in terms of their development,” O’Leary said.
That’s all the product of hard work in the off-season, something that’s an absolute must for any player these days.
“You can’t just fake that,” said O’Leary. “You can’t just go home and turn the calendar over a couple times and expect to be a better player. It’s the work, that’s where it always starts, with the compete level and doing things with a true purpose even in the off-season. With what I’m hearing and seeing from the guys in the off-season, they took that to heart.”
Camp continues on Friday with rookie camp scrimmage at 9 a.m., main camp practice at 11 a.m., rookie camp scrimmage at 2:30 p.m. and the main camp three-on-three scrimmage at 5:30 p.m.
The team will trim rookies heading into the heart of camp Saturday, with a main camp scrimmage at 9 a.m., practices at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. and scrimmage at 3:30 p.m.
Things wrap up Sunday with main camp practice at 10:30 a.m. and the Black-White Intrasquad Game at 12 p.m.
All the action takes place at the Moose Jaw Events Centre and is open to the public.
