The Grande Prairie Storm of the AJHL have their regular season getting underway this weekend.
Storm head coach Mike Vandekamp says with the team going through a bit of a rebuild right now, this year’s club has seen some changes from last season.
“We have a lot of new faces. We have some returning faces as well, guys that we felt we could still build around. We’ve brought in some veteran players from outside of our team too. It’s a good balance of new players and I think our age is pretty balanced our right now between young players and older players. We’re excited about being a good competitive team again in this league.”
Vandekamp says their training camp was “unique” because of the limited playing time most of their players had last season.
“We just had less of a sample size when it came to scouting. A lot of players, in Canada particularly, didn’t play a lot last year. Some of these midget aged players only played four or five games. We weren’t able to attend games live and did a lot of scouting over video which isn’t as good as watching a game live.”
The Storm will play two games in Drayton Valley this weekend before having their home opener on September 25 against the Sherwood Park Crusaders.
You can listen to our full interview with Vandekamp below.
– Kyle Moore, Trending 55 Newsroom
