Following an undefeated season, the Cranbrook Black Wolves lacrosse team captured the MacDonald Cup to cap off an invitational tournament in Port Coquitlam on Aug. 13.
“It was a great event, a great way to end the season. Finishing the season undefeated again, 27-0, is pretty remarkable for this group, especially with the amount of games at the end of the year they had to play in the short amount of days,” said Black Wolves head coach Russ Sheppard.
“It was a grind, [but] they did good.”
The Black Wolves, a Tier 2 Jr. B club that plays its regular season out of Alberta, defeated the Sannich Express 9-8 in the final game of the tournament to capture the newly-rechristened trophy, which was last awarded in 1995 as a Western Canadian championship event.
Wyatt Fancy led the scoring for the Black Wolves, with a whopping seven goals, while Avery Burki and Fletcher Backshell-Jones also tallied, while goalie Cam Pilon made 28 saves.
It was a tense back-and-forth game as both sides were tied 6-6 heading into the final period, according to Sheppard.
“It was pretty clear that the team that was going to be able to sacrifice and stay disciplined in the third period was probably going to be in a good position to win,” said Sheppard. “I challenged my guys to do that, so that’s what happened.”
Saanich took an early 4-3 lead after the first period, even though they got into some penalty trouble.
“We were pretty banged up, I thought Saanich would come in and try to really play a skilled lacrosse game up and down the floor, but it was pretty clear from the opening whistle that they were going to play a very heavy, aggressive, physical game,” Sheppard said.
“So they took a lot of penalties early and our powerplay was deadly all weekend, but unfortunately, one of our top powerplay guys had a pretty banged up hand…so our powerplay sputtered a bit, and then it was just trading goals back and forth.
“It was a bit of a heavyweight fight.”
It was quite the season for the Black Wolves program, which went undefeated in the Alberta-based Rocky Mountain Lacrosse League, winning the south division title and the provincial league championship earlier in August.
Sheppard says the Black Wolves program has been applying to move up another level into Jr. B Tier 1 for the last two years, but as been denied.
Sheppard has been involved with lacrosse in Cranbrook since moving to the area nearly a decade ago.
The sport has exploded amongst the youth, as registration numbers in minor lacrosse have more than tripled since 2014, buoyed by strong interest coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Much of the focus has been on making the sport available to any kinds who want to play, while also building up a depth of skill players that enables local teams to participate in high-end tournaments.
“I really believe in the grassroots base development model and so our executive really adopted that and it’s been fantastic because now, we’ve got numerous kids playing college, more than any other sport in Cranbrook in the last five, six years,” Sheppard said.
