The Fernie Ghostriders gained four points over the weekend with two wins. The first win of the season was an away game with the Ghostriders shutting out the Golden Rockets 2-0 on Sept. 30. The Ghostriders brought their momentum to the Fernie Memorial Arena the following night with another win, defeating the Castlegar Rebels 7-3.
The Golden game was the kind of performance that the Ghostrider’s head coach Craig Mohr has been looking for from the team.
“We went to Golden – that’s a really long trip, their never an easy team,” he said. “We locked it down two to nothing and probably could have had a few more but their goalie played outstanding to keep his team in the game.”
Mohr believes that there were only three or four decent scoring chances for Golden during the game, which had 14 shots on the Ghostrider goaltender.
“That was our first game against them on Friday, they have a great goalie but it is always hard to tell how a team is going to do at this time of year. They look to have an improved team from last year. We played a pretty stifling and strong game against them,” he said. “Defensively, we’ve been okay all year so I wasn’t really surprised there. It’s nice to go on the road and get a weekend started off with a shutout.”
After a disappointing home opener on Sept. 24, the Ghostriders were eager to come back to their home arena and host the Rebels on Oct. 1.
“It was nice to get a bit of our bite back on Saturday at our home game. We gave the crowd some goals to cheer for finally and we found the net seven times. I think overall we can’t ask for a better weekend,” said Mohr.
According to Mohr, the team’s weekend victories lifted some of the weight from the players.
“I think they might be relieved as much as anything,” he said. “They have been putting quite a bit of pressure on themselves and I don’t think they got off to the greatest start to the year but our week coming up to our weekend games was getting the team calmed down a bit. It’s only September so we just needed to remind them to calm down and play our hockey. We got back to playing our good structured game and good things happened.”
Last weeks practices were about returning the team to their structured play style. Mohr believes that it showed on the ice and on the scoreboard. According to Mohr, this week will be about teaching and special teams.
“It’s still early in the year so we just need to put the work in. Another thing that went really well over the weekend was our special forces,” he said. “We really didn’t give anything up on our penalty kill and our power play came to life in the game against Castlegar. We will be doing a lot of special teams stuff and continue to build on that. We just want to keep the snowball rolling in the right direction. Lets build on what we did over the weekend and go from there.”
This weekend will be away games playing in Spokane and Grand Forks. The next home game will be October 14 against the Golden Rockets at 7:30 p.m.
“We are in Spokane on Friday and another away game in Grand Forks Saturday. That will put us at nine games on the road and only two at home. Both of the games will be on the radio, so we hope to get a lot of people listening in. We hope to continue the mini roll going from here,” said Mohr.