With a week of rest and practice behind them following a sweep of the Regina Rangers, the midget AA Estevan Bruins are both confident and healthy heading into their second-round matchup. Beginning on Wednesday, March 4, they'll be facing off with the Yorkton AA Terriers, with game one at Affinity Place at 7:00.

The season series favors the Bruins, as it does with most teams in the league after their stellar 31-3-1-1 campaign. They won three games against the Terriers starting with a 4-1 victory on December 15. Those wins, however, didn't come easily according to the team.

"All three games were fairly hard-fought," said head coach Riley Hengen. "We won all three games but they were tough games every time we played those guys. They're a physical team, they work hard, so they definitely create a tough matchup."

The Terriers are coming off a tough four-game series against the Regina Vics. All four of their games were close, with the finale in Regina being a 2-1 Terriers victory. The Terriers held the Vics to just six goals over the course of those four games, and Hengen has a feeling he knows how.

"That just says a lot of about their goaltender," he said of Terriers' netminder Durban Hleboff, who made 28 saves on 29 shots in the deciding fourth game. "He's a good goalie so we're going to need to find ways to make it difficult for him and find ways to score on that guy because he can definitely play and he'll stop what he sees."

Hengen, a former goalie himself, says the recipe for getting under the skin of a goalie like Hleboff is to get bodies in front of him and force him to contend with plenty of traffic every time he has to make a save. But Hleboff isn't the Terriers' only major weapon. 

"Their first line, they're dangerous. They've got a couple of guys who can skate well and move the puck, and their guys are physical just as anybody else," said Hengen. "Their top line there has a couple of guys we need to shut down."

The Bruins have the advantage of being well-rested, as their last series wrapped up on Sunday, February 23 when they downed the Rangers 5-1. The Terriers, however, played only one additional game and finished their series only a couple of days after the Bruins did.    

After game one, the best-of-three series shifts back to Yorkton for a matinee game on Saturday, March 7, before returning to Estevan on Sunday, March 8 at 2:30. Any other games will be played as necessary with game four, if required, going back to Yorkton and the fifth game in Estevan.