After their most successful season in franchise history, the Swan Valley Stampeders cleaned out their locker rooms this week. The team limped into the playoffs in the 2017-2018 season with a 28-25-6-1 record which earned them a berth against the league best, Steinbach Pistons in the quarterfinals.
This past season, the Stamps' led by Head Coach and General Manager Barry Wolff were a force to be reckoned with. They went 42-13-3-2 and finished second in the MJHL.
After beating Dauphin in the quarterfinals and Steinbach in the semi-finals, the Stampeders were set for their first league final in franchise history. That final went down to game seven and even overtime before the Stamps' saw their remarkable season come to an end.
"We're proud of the guys in the room. They battled hard every night and our goal was to get better every day and for the most part, I think we did that," said Barry Wolff. "Also the community, the way they surrounded us and believed in us, it really was unbelievable."
Darren Webster has spent the past six years with the Stampeder organization. This year he stepped into the role of Head Coach and General Manager for a brief time until Barry was hired. At that point, he stepped into an Assistant Coach role.
"It was a pretty special year, we're proud of everyone," said Webster. "At the start of the year we knew what pieces could come back and we thought we could contend for a league title. It was pretty surreal when you get to do the long playoff run; it was the first of my experience. To do it with this organization and everyone in the community, it makes you speechless. I was just trying to sit back and take it all in."
Several players will not be back with the team next season. Josh Tripp, Bradly Goethals, Quintin Sudom, Dane Hirst, Alexander Uryga, and Tucker Scantlebury to name a few will graduate from junior hockey.
Matthew Osadick who put up 63 points this year and is committed to Maine University is still eligible for next season.
"There is definitely going to be a lot of work to do in the off-season to get the roster as close as it was this season for sure," said Wolff. "There are players out there and you just have to turn every stone over sometimes to find them. We added quite a few players this season and a lot of them became impact players."
"I think we need a little bit of everything, we obviously need some offensive gifted players to replace the ones graduating and we need some strong back end players as well for the ones graduating," he added.
Although Swan Valley didn't fully achieve their goal of winning a national championship, the great season should also help them moving forward in recruiting top prospects to Swan River to wear Stampeder colours.
"There is no doubt that winning makes recruiting a lot easier, it gets your prospects pretty exciting and we saw some of them around the rink during our playoff run," said Webster. "It's a lot easier to sell your program when you can make it to the league final. It also helps when you have a coach like Barry with all of his experience. Our goal is to provide these players with stability and we want to send them to the next level."
The team will now hold their year-end banquet this evening at the Veterans Community Hall at 6:00 p.m. and dinner follows one hour later.
You can call or text Cramer Coulthart at 204-281-4255 for tickets.
