It’s Minto Cup or bust for the Okotoks Jr. A Raiders this season.
Lofty expectations perhaps, but it’s the type of winning culture the Rocky Mountain Lacrosse League (RMLL) team is looking to regain after the Calgary Mountaineers snapped Okotoks’ streak of consecutive appearances at the Junior A national championships.
“The expectations are that we want to win Alberta and go to the Minto Cup,” said Raiders head coach Daryl Haynes. “Redemption is always on everybody’s minds. We absolutely want to beat (Calgary), but we don’t want to make that our sole focus.”
The Raiders, who finished first last year with a 13-4-1 record, were on the wrong end of a classic seven-game final series to the Mountaineers in August, ending Okotoks run of two straight Alberta titles, and ensuring the Mounties their first trip to the Minto Cup since hosting the event in 2008.
“That loss is going to help our senior players and some of the younger players that were with us last year,” Haynes said. “It’s going to help them to remain focused to push right through.”
The Raiders and Mountaineers are again expected to be the class of the Junior A division, though the upstart Sherwood Park Titans, a new franchise born out of the relocation of the Edmonton Eclipse, could also surprise under the guidance of new coaches Paul Rai and Jimmy Quinlan. Competitive balance in the four-team league could be at an all-time high in 2013.
“From what I’ve seen and heard from talking to the other teams it’s going to be the Mounties that will be the other team we have to match up against,” Haynes said. “The Titans, they have some really good coaching so I would expect some significant improvement in them as well.”
Okotoks will bring back the lion’s share of its roster from last season, save for a couple of extremely notable exceptions. League leading goal scorer James Delaney and invaluable transition player Kyle Dexter are both lost to graduation.
“It’s a different roster. We’ve had four or five young guys really step up and impress us this year,” said Haynes, noting the early contributions of draft picks and rookies Dylan Kinnear, Cade McCormick, Clayton Warren and Justin Mount. “We tried to play a run-and-gun style last year and I think the personnel this year is even better set up for that particular style of play.
“Losing Delaney is really going to hurt us from a goal scoring perspective, but we will expect other players to pick up the slack as a platoon on the right side.”
Second leading scorer Holden Cattoni, and his 45 goals and 97 points, will be a big catalyst on offence when he returns from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Team captain Brett Baron, southpaw playmaker Jordan Getz, twin brothers Marshall and Leighton Gibson and speedster Kevin Pym all finished in the top-26 in league scoring and return to the Raiders fold for 2013. Big-bodied Okotokian Cam Copland, slippery sniper Ben Fream and consummate teammate Aaron Tackaberry should also chip in considerable offence.
Incumbents rule the day on defence and in transition with the likes of McCormick, Curtis McMullen, Kyle Burrell, Raymond Banister and Ethan Trotter once again part of a physical back end.
“We’re coming in with one of the best training camps I’ve seen,” said Tackaberry, entering his fifth year of ball with the Raiders. “One of the highest compete levels we’ve seen going into the year so we’re looking forward to one of the best seasons we’ve had.
“We’re a roster filled with veterans who’ve experienced the highs and the lows.”
The Raiders open their regular season Sunday May 11 when the St. Albert Miners pay Pason Centennial Arena a visit at 3 p.m. The Miners spearheaded a movement in the offseason to have Okotoks kicked out of the league due to an acrimonious relationship with the other members of the RMLL’s Jr. A division.
“We’re definitely going to have a chip on our shoulder and have the mentality that it’s us against everybody else,” Tackaberry said. “We’re always going to be fired up for the first game of the year. Everybody knows what they did. We’ve moved on from that and it’s a new season.
“But it’s definitely going to add some fuel to the fire.
Okotoks then gets its first crack at the Mountaineers on May 15 at Calgary’s Stu Peppard Arena. The Raiders conclude a busy week with a three-day trip to British Columbia to tango with the Langley Thunder, Coquitlam Adanacs and Port Coquitlam Saints from May 18-20.
To keep up with the latest on the Raiders visit raiderslacrosse.com
