During 10 days, the Raymond-Bourque arena welcomed 94 teams in the Novice, Atome, Pee-wee, Bantam and Midget categories ranging from level C to A. Three regions were represented: Laval, Richelieu and Lac St. Louis, home of the Laurentian teams.
Every final game was played on the last day of the tournament, which resulted in over 24 hours of hockey. On January 20, from 8 a.m. until midnight, it was all about getting the gold.
To start things off, two teams from St. Laurent were going head to head as the Rockets and the Sonics battled for Novice C supremacy. The game was close all along, but the Sonics were finally able to pull it off by a score of 4 to 3.
The Novice A-version of the Sonics was also in action during the final day of the tournament. The young stick handlers fought valiantly, but ended up losing 8 to 2 against the Laval Nord Predators.
The last game of day saw the two best Midget A teams facing off. The St. Laurent Rockets proved to be too strong for the Vaudreuil Vikings as the local team crushed its opponent by a score of 7 to 1.
Tournament director Jeff Goodman is very satisfied with the overall success of the competition. “We received some good feedbacks from everyone, including the people from the associations, he said. Everything was fine, we didn’t have any problems.” He then added that the reason why the tournament was such a success is because of the tremendous work by the volunteers and the people on the comity, namely Michel Cohen, Elie Abi-Saad, Alain Vachon, George Pisimisis, Robert Fortin and Vincent Hunter. “Many parents didn’t hesitate to take some of their own free time to help us out and our comity has been working on this tournament since this summer,” mentioned Mr. Goodman.
This year’s edition of the tournament brought up a few new features, like former Montreal Canadien Yvon Lambert doing the inaugural face-off. Next year, Mr. Goodman and communication director Elie Abi Saad hope to be able to broadcast the games live on the web. “We would also like to have even more teams and possibly another region.”
For these men, the joy of seeing children having fun on the ice is more than enough to reward them for their hard work, but Jeff Goodman and Michel Cohen got a little extra this year as both their sons took part in the final game. “It was like our gift after a very long day of hockey,” said the two men.
