By Nathan Kanter

First ever Battlefords AA female midget team off to great start

Nov 23, 2016 | 11:00 AM

The Midget A female Sharks are playing in their third season in the North Sask Female Hockey League, but one level up, there’s a brand new Sharks team in its inaugural season.

And they’re already making their mark.

It’s a first for the Battlefords area to have a AA midget female team at all, and the AA Sharks are currently in third place in the seven-team division of the NSFHL with a 2-4-1 record.

“We’re doing really well, considering it’s a first-year team and we’ve not had one before,” Sharks AA coach Jim Puffalt, whose daughter Madison plays on the team, said. “We’re … pretty excited to have a new team in the area and have an opportunity for female players to hone their skills.”

Puffalt credits the idea of organizing a AA team to former AAA Sharks coach Ashley Rafuse.

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At the end of a disappointing last season for the AAA Sharks, Rafuse said she hoped one day Battlefords could set up a AA team to help develop young female players and help bridge the gap between A and AAA. That way, there would be better local talent at the AAA level.

“[Rafuse] said to a couple of parents ‘There should be a AA team – a developmental team,’ and then a couple of us took that on,” Puffalt recalled. “It was a lot of work but it was very fulfilling in the end and I think a great opportunity for hockey players in the Battlefords to stay at home and play a higher level of hockey.

Puffalt said the Battlefords Minor Hockey Association was very supportive and helpful getting approval.

Setting up a new team also came with its own difficulties, specifically finding enough players and convincing those involved this was the right thing to do.

“A lot of it was finding kids that had the level that wanted to come down here and skate,” Puffalt said. “There’s not an overabundance of them so it was an opportunity to find girls in the area that wanted to play this level of hockey and there were a lot of things that we needed to work on and put a development plan together.”

With the help of parent Terry Korpach (who’s daughter Kaitlyn currently leads the team in scoring), the turnout at try-outs was very successful.

“Terry Korpach has been around and knows a ton of people so he was just able to make phone calls and get people coming down,” Puffalt said. “We had just about 30 kids for try-outs.”

So far, the team’s strength is their speed, which has Puffalt excited for what’s to come. Although the individual talent is abundantly clear, the next step is to get them to gel as a team.

“We’ve got a ton of kids that just can fly out there,” Puffalt said. “We’ve worked on individual tactics and team tactics, and now we’ve just got to take it up one more to team play, which is of course in our development plan.

“We’re shooting to peak in February at playoff time. So [there is] lots of work to do there, from the start of the season to the end of the season, but the girls are a good group to work with and they’re a lot of fun.”

The AA Sharks have two home games this weekend, first at Don Ross Arena on Friday at 7:45 p.m. and then on Saturday at Battleford Arena at 4:30 p.m.

Nathan Kanter is battlefordsNOW’s sports reporter and voice of the Battlefords North Stars. He can be reached at Nathan.Kanter@jpbg.ca or tweet him @NathanKanter11