Quartet of Tri-Cities hockey players off to 2023 Canada Games
Native athletes will look to assist Group B.C. get again on the nationwide podium in Prince Edward Island.
A quartet of hockey gamers from the Tri-Cities will hope to carry again nationwide gold from Atlantic Canada within the new yr.
BC Hockey has tapped native athletes Jordan Baxter, Gillian Lapierre and London McDavid for the 2023 Canada Winter Games to characterize the province on its under-18 girls’s hockey crew.
As nicely, Coquitlam’s Benjamin Kindel will swimsuit up on the under-16 males’s aspect of the Prince Edward Island match in February and March.
All gamers had been chosen from a sequence of try-out camps throughout B.C., and their present regular-season play additionally performed a job of their choice.
“It was the toughest choice course of I’ve been part of and every participant gave it every little thing that they had,” mentioned B.C. feminine under-18 coach Kris Hogg in a launch.
“Now we transfer forward with extra preparation heading into the Canada Winter Video games and I’m extraordinarily excited to proceed the expansion of this group, on-and-off the ice, as we put together for the largest stage in P.E.I.”
Baxter, a Coquitlam product, just lately acquired a second call from Canada to play for the national team on the under-18 girls’s worlds in Sweden.
The 17-year-old Delta Hockey Academy captain has posted 18 targets and 30 factors in 16 video games this season, ok for second amongst feminine under-18 prep gamers within the Canadian Sport College Hockey League (CSSHL).
She and Lapierre of Port Coquitlam are trying to win back-to-back gold with Group B.C. after claiming first on the 2021 western regional championships.
As of this publication (Dec. 25), Lapierre is averaging some extent per sport with 11 in 11 contests with the Fraser Valley Rush, who claimed the silver medal at the 2022 Esso Cup.
McDavid presently has 17 factors in 16 video games with Delta Hockey Academy.
Baxter, Lapierre and McDavid are all alumni of the Tri-Cities Predators Feminine Ice hockey Affiliation.
Group B.C.’s girls’s crew are the reigning bronze medalists from the final Canada Winter Video games in 2019.
In the meantime, Kindel has tallied 12 assists and 18 factors in 15 video games with Abbotsford’s Yale Hockey Academy – additionally members of the CSSHL.
The Calgary Hitmen prospect is tied for second on the Lions under-18 prep squad’s stats sheet.
The B.C. males’s hockey crew has but to assert a nationwide medal since 2011, when the province received gold in RisePEI.
The 2023 Canada Winter Video games in P.E.I. is about for Feb. 18 to March 5.
