The Fernie Ghostriders have turned around their slow season start with six wins in a row. Head Coach of the Fernie Ghostriders spoke with The Free Press after the teams 7-0 shut out win against the Golden Rockets at home on Oct. 14 and the coach believes that the win streak is not a fluke.
“We had such a great week of practice. Normally when you practice as well as we did it leads you to have a pretty good weekend. Sometimes you don’t notice stuff, people don’t see our practices, but their focus and energy in our practices on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were as good as they’ve been all year and that rolled into tonight’s game,” said Mohr. “I thought we were relentless on the puck. Every loose puck we got to – we pinned them in their own zone. I loved the work ethic, and we actually scored some goals tonight, we picked some corners – that kid on Golden is a great goalie, you have to make good shots and good plays to beat him. I thought in the first we didn’t really make those plays, but in the second and third we did.”
Mohr believes that the four goals to the Ryan Kennedy, Riley Siebel and Tayler Sincennes line were long overdue.
“I think right now if you look at the Kennedy, Siebel and Sincennes line, they have just caught fire. They have been playing so good in the past three weeks and everyone has kind of fed off them. If we can continue to play like tonight we won’t give up much,” he said.
Sincennes was pleasantly surprised with his game against Golden, scoring three goals.
“It was a nice surprise, I felt a little sluggish in warm up but the puck followed me around and I ended up getting three goals so it feels good,” he said.
Mitch Titus was another happy face after the game.
“We moved our feet lots, we outworked them in their end and it was a dominating effort. It got a little dirty in the third period but we beat them there too,” said Titus. “We dominated with our structure, they didn’t have anything to play off of.”
Sincennes believes another reason for the wins, is the on ice cohesiveness for the Fernie squad.
“It’s awesome, they are gelling along really well. We have a good group in the change room and it took some time to click on the ice but we hung out off the ice every day and it is just a good mix of guys,” he said. “We are on the upswing now. We had a slow start but, it happens, it’s 47 games this year so...”
This year is the first season that the Ghostriders will be travelling to the West Kootenay. Titus and the team are looking forward to the new teams and challenges they will face.
“I think it’s nice. I think it will make for some more rivalry, I can see where some of the teams come from with not being able to cross conference often but either way you get the games in and it’s fun to go play the West Kootenay – they have some pretty rowdy crowds over there too,” he said.
Despite the big win, Mohr was already looking to the teams next game of the weekend where they beat Columbia Valley in an away game 4-2.
“It’s over it’s great, and Butler gets a shut out, but we have another game this weekend. We are in Columbia Valley tomorrow, and we will have a bunch of different lines I think after all the suspensions that came out of this game. If we can have the attention to detail and work ethic we had tonight we should see success in the future,” he said. “I think it is building, hammering it in and making our game consistent. We are going to play some teams next week that we saw the week before and we can get an idea on Spokane and Grand Forks on how they play and just keep this roll growing.”
The next home game is Oct. 21 where the Riders will take on Spokane. The puck drops at 7:30 p.m. The following day, the Ghostriders will be playing a special “home” in Elkford when they host Grand Forks.