Members of the 14U Estevan Sharks were in the water in Edmonton over the weekend, under the banners of Prairie Boys and Prairie Girls, in the Western National Championships.

The Girls made to the Bronze medal game, where they settled for a fourth place finish. The Boys, meanwhile, finished their run in fifth.

"Overall, I think it went really well. You could see a lot of development with the kids, and they improved with each game over the tournament," shared Coach Mona Hack.

The 14U teams will now put away their swimsuits for awhile until the fall, when they again hit the pool. At that point, they'll begin to hammer on the important areas such as shooting.

"It's been a good season, and the kids have really improved a lot over the whole entire thing this year."

 Submitted story is below.

After months of provincial competition, the 2018 14U Western National Championship played this weekend in Edmonton with eight boys and eight girls’ teams competing against one another for the title of Western National Champion.

The 2018 Western National Championships featured teams from all four western provinces. Teams qualified for the Finals through their performance in the three western provincial 14U leagues that took place annually in British Columbia, Alberta, and Manitoba/Saskatchewan. In 2018, the top three girls and boys’ teams from B.C. and Alberta, and the top two teams from Manitoba/Saskatchewan qualified for the Finals. All games this weekend were thrilling to watch as many of these teams have never faced each other before and had to adapt on the fly.

The tournament began with a round robin tournament. Both the girls’ and boys’ divisions featured two groups of four teams each, with each teams playing one game against the other teams in their pool. The top two teams from each pool then advanced to the semi-finals.

During the round robin play the Prairie Boys team played hard during the round robin but found themselves coming up short with having to fight their way out of the 7/8 position. But they regrouped and with some strong defensive and offensive plays from Cameron Gillingham the Prairie Team won in a shoot out against Team Manitoba and found themselves in the semi-finals against Calgary Destroyers.  The Prairie boys had never played this team before so they anticipated a tough game, but the Prairie boys game out strong and with 4 goals in the first quarter.  The Destroyers came back in the second quarter with 4 goals of their own but the Prairie boys scored 2 more goals to keep the lead.  The third quarter saw 5 goals from the boys and they held their lead straight through to the finish were they came out on top with a 13-8 win and a 5th place finish overall for the team in Western Canada.  Coaches were very impressed the improvement of this team and how well they played considering this was the first time for more than half of these players to play at this level.  Next year will be an exciting year to see how this team grows.

The Prairie Girls round robin play found them going into the semi-finals and playing the Calgary Renegades for the Bronze medal.  The game was tight in the first quarter as boy the Prairie girls and Renegades kept the pressure on and only scored one goal.  The second quarter proved to be just as defensive as no goals were scored by either team and the great goalie work by Josie Andrist played a big factor in that.  The third quarter the girls scored one goal to take the lead but in the fourth quarter the Renegades came back scoring 2 goals and the Prairie girls scoring one.  This left the girls in a shoot out position and unfortunately the Renegades out shot them and took the win with a 6-4 finish.