Travel Tournaments

Warning....LOTS of hockey and lots of pictures in this post! 😉

Luke's Squirt A team with their siblings at the sibling game.

Aiden and two of his buddies at one of Luke's games

Luke's team pre game

Champions of the Thief River Falls Showdown tournament 

Team and Sibling picture

Team pic outside one of the arenas

Watching the siblings in the Old Arena built in 1936

Aiden and his buddies getting ready to play

Awesome first place trophy!

Back home...the trophy is in the case at the rink!

Liam and his teammate, Evan

Trading Pins!

Intro to Curling

Liam's team took a class to learn how to Curl

Finn loved the sibling saran wrap ball

81 Squirt B1 teams from the US and Canada

First place in their bracket

Liam with the trophy

Liam and his buddy driving home post game with the trophy

The past two weekends in February have been busy ones for us.  Luke's Squirt A hockey team traveled to Thief River Falls, MN for their tournament over the weekend of February 8-10.  Our original plan was for all six of us to go, but when we realized the logistics of doing that with Liam's district game and practices, some very bad weather, Finn being sick, a small hotel room for all of us...we opted to split up.  John took Luke and Aiden to Thief River Falls for Luke's tournament while Liam, Finn, and I stayed home.  Aiden went with John because a big group of his hockey buddies played a Thief River Falls team with kids Aiden's age while they were on the trip.  Luke's team was quite successful and came home with a first place trophy.  Luke had a blast and despite being tired, enjoyed every minute of it.

Over the weekend of February 15-17th, Liam's team traveled to Fargo, North Dakota for their travel tournament.  They played in the Squirt International with 81 other B1 teams.  This tournament was gigantic and involved teams from the US and Canada.  We only played one team from Minnesota.  Liam's team also had a great showing in Fargo where they won their bracket.  Because there were so many teams in this tournament, the teams were seeded into brackets after their first two games.  If you won both games, you moved up to the higher bracket.  If you lost both games, you moved down. We ended up in the upper middle bracket and finished in first place.  The only team we lost to over the weekend ended up being a team from Spokane, Washington that won the entire tournament.  It was a fun-filled weekend with pin trading, curling, swimming, games, and more pin trading.  We were all very happy to sleep in our own beds, but the boys loved it all.  One impressive stat from Liam was his total of 5 goals and 4 assists to lead his team (his team scored a total of 18 goals so Liam had a role in half of them).  This is huge progress for Liam who has really stepped up to be a leader this season on his team.

In between our busy February with two tournaments, we have had a TON of snow!!  It has been the snowiest February on record for Minnesota.  The first record was 26 inches set in 1962.  At this point, we have already passed the 26 inches of snow and we are well on our way to a new record with at least two more snow storms on the way.  The snow banks are piled higher than I am tall.  We have missed more days of school than I ever would have imagined.