The Okotoks Raiders won’t be getting a chance to defend their Rocky Mountain Lacrosse League Senior B league crown.
The top-seeded Senior squad fell to the fourth-seed Calgary Knights 11-8 in Game 3 of the league semifinals at SAIT on Thursday to complete a three-game sweep.
“We had a hard time getting in our groove,” Raiders coach Jared McNicol said. “We basically hit a slide at the wrong time and they got hot at the right time.”
After winning all four meetings with the Knights in the regular season, it was a confident Okotoks club that took to the floor for Game 1.
However, a series of Raiders’ injuries to key players and newly acquired assets by the Knights managed to turn the tide and result in Calgary’s relative domination of the series.
The losses of key offensive players like Danny Dahms and Danny Farmer resulted in Okotoks having to employ some defensive guys up front to compensate,” McNicol explained.
The risky strategy didn’t pay off, as the Knights were able to take advantage of the exposed Raiders’ defence.
Raiders' captain Josh Sartorelli was hesitant to blame being swept on injuries but did acknowledge that the loss of some of his teammates became too big of a challenge to overcome.
Aside from that, the confidence served by sweeping a team in the regular season didn’t seem to serve Okotoks well in the postseason.
“We were a little overconfident. A lot of us were thinking ‘We ran them four straight in the regular season so why wouldn’t we be able to do three straight in playoffs?’” Sartorelli said.
Although it was a disappointing end to the season, the Senior Raiders can take a lot of positives out of the 2011 campaign.
With 12 new faces, 10 of them being rookies, heading into the season, the chances of claiming the regular season title appeared slim.
However, the Raiders came together quickly and finished atop the RMLL with a 13-5 record.
“If you told me we were going to win the league at the start of the year, I probably would’ve said you’re nuts,” McNicol said.
Both McNicol and Sartorelli agreed that the senior squad has a bright future ahead.
“We have a strong future ahead with pretty good players,” McNicol said.
Sartorelli said the Raiders’ young guns would be well served by the playoff experience and the hard lessons that they’ve learned from this series.
“A lot of us are just going to look back and realize that we had a young lineup in,” he said.
“They’re just going to have the experience of what it’s like and what it’s going to take to win a playoff series in this league.”
The Calgary Knights will face the winner of the Edmonton Outlaws and St. Albert Miners semi-final series for the RMLL league title.
