The Niverville Atom A Clippers ended their season as double champions, following up their Eastman league championship with the Provincial Atom AA title in Portage La Prairie this past weekend.
The Atom A team went undefeated during their Eastman playoffs a few days earlier. They went on an undefeated stretch that dates back to February 10, with the team not losing a single game for the final five weeks of the season, including a sweep of the Eastman playoffs as well as the Provincial championships, according to assistant coach Ray Dowse.
The Rural AA Provincials includes the highest-level teams in Manitoba outside the city of Winnipeg. With only the top two teams in each division advancing to the final, the Clippers needed to defeat the other highly skilled teams within their pool—Winkler, Dauphin, and Brandon. They started the tournament Friday evening with an 8–6 win against the Winkler Flyers, who had gone undefeated in their regular season in the Pembina Valley Minor Hockey League.
That set the tone for what would be a series of tight games for Niverville.
Dowse says that the team’s biggest strengths were teamwork and resiliency.
“This group peaked this weekend and worked so well as a team,” Dowse says. “We were down in a couple of games, but they just never stopped!”
The Clippers faced off against Brandon on Saturday, winning by a score of 4–1, before playing their final round-robin round against Dauphin.
“The team was down 4–2 in that match with five minutes to play in the third period before scoring two goals within a 30-second span to tie the game,” says Dowse.
They went on to score the winning goal in the last minute of play to secure the victory and top spot in the division.
In Sunday’s semifinal game, the Clippers faced off against their Eastman rivals, the Mitchell Mohawks, who they beat by a score of 5–2, clinching their spot in the championship game. The championship game saw Niverville matched against MacDonald, who had also won their regional championship banner. The Clippers had only played this team once before, at the beginning of the season, where they fell 4–2 to MacDonald.
In what was anticipated as a tight matchup, both teams were serious about earning the title of Provincial champs. This led to a back-and-forth game for the first thirty minutes of play. Ending the first period with a 2–2 score, MacDonald took the lead early in the second before the Clippers came back and scored three unanswered goals. With one second left in the second, Clippers goaltender Zaiden McDonald-Horvath made an unbelievable save to keep the Clippers ahead with a score of 5–3.
The third period saw the Clippers score one more goal before both teams went scoreless for the remainder of the game.
“The feeling on the ice after the game was elation [from] players, coaches, parents, [and] fans,” Dowse says of the proud moment. “The kids performed their team dance to ‘Juicy Wiggle’ at centre ice after the game with big smiles and their medals hanging proudly around their necks.”
