It was a busy day over at Velocity on Sunday.  Five good games of evenly balanced play.  Starting with Duluth East and Maple Grove.  The Hounds took out the Crimson 22-14, their leading scorer was big man, Ian Mageau with 14 points, leading the Crimson was Tyler Borsch with 19. In the next game, Centennial beat ChaskaChan 17-6, Zack Kelly lead the way for the Cougars with 21 points on the weekend. In the D6 third place finishers game, EP knocked off Edina 14-9. Nick Lievermann had 21 points to lead the way for the Eagles and Bram Scheerer had 19 for the Hornets this weekend.

In the the Third Place game (runner up finishers in Pool Play), STMA came from down 14-11 to beat Minnetonka 16-15. Mitch Bourgerie lead the Knight and was second all weekend with a whopping 34 points.  The Skippers top scorer was Jack Meredith with 22 points (18/4).

The championship game featured the two highest scoring teams with the two best goalies of the tournament, Ben Meyers from Elk River and Reid Waszczenko (thank God for cut and paste) from Waconia.  Something had to give, would it be high scoring or low scoring. You know what they say about defense wins championships.  This championship game was about as low scoring as it gets for 3v3 hockey. Small rink, no checking, no off-sides and a plethora of odd man rushes and penalty shots usually equals 30+ goals a game.  Not on Sunday. Every goal was a prize.  Meyers and Waszczenko were outstanding, both faced 70 shots and both made incredible saves the entire hour of play. To view a clip of a Meyers penalty shot save click this link: MeyersSave. To view a clip of a Waszczenko penalty shot save click this link: Waszczenko. Note: this is our first attempt of attaching video to a story, the content may show signs of needed improvement.

Neither team enjoyed a big lead the entire game.  We lost track of the lead changes, but it had to be close to 10. Neither team’s top guns got over three goals and only one player scored on a penalty shot of nine taken. The story was the goaltending.

It was fitting that the game winning goal scored by Elk River’s Jensen Zerban was scored from behind the Waconia goal with two minutes left to give the Elks a 11-10 lead. The last two minutes was a scramble. With less than 30 seconds left an Elk defender crashed into Waconia big man Matt Anderson on the sideboards setting up a potential game tying penalty shot.  YHH won’t tell the story, Twitter will.  After the game here is what Anderson tweeted, “@YouthHockeyHub BEAUTIFUL paddle save by @tendy_31 (edit Ben Meyers) and a great performance by the elks! #goodgame” This by the kid who didn’t score the GTG sums up why today was such a great display of hockey.

Commentary: We really enjoy the Velocity 3v3 tournament each year because it is a great preview for the coming association season. Waconia, while truly not a true representation of association hockey assembled a very nice team of ’99 players from the west Metro in a tournament loaded with top ’98 talent was a great story and fun team to watch.  Players like Almquist and Marooney heading into their first year of Bantams stood out and legends like Anderson and the Michel twins were fun to watch gel over the weekend. Watching association teams like Elk River, STMA, and Minnetonka find their form heading into the season was also very fun to watch.  These teams now have something to build on heading into the Winter grind. I’m sure their players, coaches and fans will be dreaming of big things this year.

Tourney MVP: Leading scorer in the tournament by a country mile was Jax Murray.  He averaged seven plus goals a game heading into the championship and flashed his skill both as a scorer and as a passer all weekend.  Definitely not the only star on his team or the tournament, but Murray stood out to all observers this weekend. Other notables were all of the goalies who stood in and faced over 3,000 shots this weekend. A few new names that surfaced to our lens were Logan Gacke from Elk River, Jack Michel from Waconia, and Jack Bowman from Minnetonka.