By Tina Comeau
THE VANGUARD
NovaNewsNow
No one can accuse the Yarmouth Mariners of not making hockey exciting for their fans during the final month of the regular season.
In the span of seven days the team had gone from last place in the Bent Division, to tying for the fifth spot and a coveted playoff position, to beating the team with the most points and best record in the league, to claiming a playoff spot in their division and knocking another team to last place.
And the season isn’t over yet.
During a three-game home stance Feb. 5-7, the Mariners picked up two out of three wins.
In Woodstock on Feb. 10 the squad picked up a big win when it defeated the Slammers 5-4. The win was big because it moved the Mariners into a points tie with the Amherst Ramblers. But it was also big because it was just the second time this season that the Slammers had lost a game in regulation play.
As if to put an exclamation mark on that win, the following night the Mariners handed the Halifax Lions a 7-2 loss. The Feb. 11 win gave the Mariners 40 points and slid them ahead of the Ramblers in the division standings.
So what’s changed for the team that as of Friday had 24 losses compared to 18 wins? “I think just the whole attitude of the hockey club,” head coach Laurie Barron says. Barron returned to the bench at the start of the new year after having been replaced as head coach prior to the start of the 2009-10 season. “I know when I took over the team was pretty fragile, they had been through a lot of turmoil,” he says. But adding Justin Chiasson and Marco Desveaux to the roster, and with the leadership of team captain Carl Hayes, there’s been a shift on and off the ice.
The Mariners are still a young team and Barron says they’ve had to find their way.
They certainly found it this past week. “And the other thing is of late our goaltending has been spectacular,” he adds.
No kidding.
Consider that in their victory over Woodstock on Wednesday Yarmouth goaltender Alex Newman stopped 52 of 56 shots on net, double what he opponent had to do with the Mariners only getting 26 shots on net.
Barron says that of course when the Mariners have been going onto the ice there is one thing going through their minds: Make the playoffs. But to even hope to do this they’d have to go through the league-leading Woodstock Slammers and the division-leading Truro Bearcats. In three recent match-ups it was the Mariners who captured those six points. “I think that their first win against Truro, probably was one where we started believing, we can make the playoffs,” Barron says.
In their game Wednesday against Woodstock, Barron says that with the exception of 10 minutes in the first period, the team played a perfect game. “We slowed the game down, we trapped and everybody bought into the game plan, and again, we got spectacular goaltending,” he says.
Yarmouth is host Woodstock Saturday, Feb. 13. Gametime is 7:30 p.m. The remaining games for Yarmouth are a Feb. 18 road trip to Bridgewater, a Feb. 19 home game against Pictou and they’ll end their regular season with a Feb. 27 home game against Halifax.
For the team, if it’s going to make the playoffs fifth place isn’t good enough. Besides, it doesn’t want to have to worry about playing the mini series to get into the real crux of playoffs. “When we started this whole process we talked about trying to get third place and I know a lot of people thought, ‘You’re out of your minds, you’re in last place, what are you talking about?’ But I’m a true believer that you have to try and shoot for something and you want to shoot high. And right now we’ve got a shot at it.”
Part of this is because Bridgewater and Halifax sit just ahead of the Mariners and those two teams have to play each other twice before their seasons end.
But Barron says they worry about nobody but themselves. While their fans play the scenarios in their heads, the team hasn’t been consumed with scoreboard watching.
It just concentrates, instead, on what it can control. “And we’ve done a better job, the discipline has been a lot better,” says Barron.
And like the saying goes, it ain’t over, until it’s over.
And it ain’t over yet.
