The Save-On-Foods Oceanside Generals are still without a win this season after dropping both games in last weekend’s VIJHL action.
Hosting the Saanich Braves on Saturday night, the Gens were still searching for their first win after a 7-0 loss to the Nanaimo Buccaneers earlier last week. The Generals would remain without a win, losing 6-4 to the Braves.
“It’s comes down to learning how to win,” head coach Brad Knight said. “We’ve gone through trying to break the bad habits, we just have to learn to win. We need to understand what’s important here. I think we’re trying to figure out what’s more important, scoring a goal or getting a win. We have to keep finding the answers to what’s important to these kids in the dressing room.”
After being down 5-2 with eight minutes left in the third against Saanich, the Gens fought back to bring it within a goal, as Josh Harvey scored on the power play and Qualicum Beach’s Landon Dziadyk scored his first VIJHL goal to bring the score to 5-4. The Gens would fall short though, with the Braves adding an empty net goal for good measure with one second on the clock.
“I thought that third period was our best period of the year so far,” Knight said. “We played hard in the first and the third, I thought our second period was terrible. We’ll just keep looking around for the solutions and hopefully we’ll find it eventually. We just need to have a team here that wants to play hard and if we don’t have players that are willing to do that, we need to get rid of them.”
“We’re not going to lay down this year. We wanted to give it five games to evaluate what we had here, so we’ll make some changes if we have to. We have more skill this season, we just have to have more heart.”
Finding themselves on the losing end of a 7-0 game against the Buccaneers was something the Generals weren’t expecting after tying the same Bucs team the week before.
“I thought we gave a good effort,” captain Chandler Bruyckere said. “After the loss in Nanaimo, it was good to see the team come out and play the way we did against Saanich.”
“We just couldn’t put it together for all three periods. As a team, we need to find a way to do that, play the full 60 minutes in a game. We’ve seen what happens when you don’t play a full game and we know what the consequences are when we don’t. We can’t afford to do that anymore, so we need to figure out how to put it all together quick here.”
The Generals will have another chance to earn their first win tonight as they travel to Comox to take on the Comox Valley Glacier Kings (7 p.m. puck drop).
That marks the first of three games this week for the Gens, who will then head to Campbell River to take on the Storm on Friday night (7:30 p.m.), then return home for a matinee game Sunday (2:30 p.m.) against the Glacier Kings.