The Viking Construction Cougars have upsets on their minds.
The Cougars are the host team for B.C. Hockey's peewee Tier 1 provincial championship tournament, which starts Sunday at the Kin Centre. Of the six teams in the event, they are also the lowest seed.
"We need to have really good showings and surprise some people," said Cougars head coach Adrien Chabot.
"One of our strengths is definitely playing physical, finishing our checks -- that's a northern style and those [southern] guys typically don't like that quite as much. So we need to play physical and we want to try and keep shooters to the outside and try and generate a lot of shots for us."
The 11- and 12-year-old Cougars have two games on Sunday, the first one against Langley at 8:30 a.m. Later, at 5:30 p.m., they'll be back on the ice for a tilt against the North Shore Winter Club.
The Cats haven't played Langley since early in the season.
"At that point they had more games under their belts than we did but they handled us fairly easily," Chabot said. "They're kind of a bigger, stronger, more physical team and they've got two or three really highly-skilled guys on their team so they're going to be pretty good competition."
The Cats will also meet the Burnaby Winter Club on Monday (5:30 p.m.), Kelowna on Tuesday (5:30 p.m.) and Nanaimo on Wednesday (12:30 p.m.). The two teams with the best round-robin records will clash in Wednesday's final, scheduled for 5:30 p.m.
The Cougars are backstopped by goaltenders Rylan Anderson and Devyn Wasylyshen. Other team members are Jarin Sutton, Jeremy Gervais, Devin Sutton, Jared Stevens, James Gordon, Garrett Hilton, Darren Hards, Connor Johnson, Korbyn Chabot, Christopher Jandric, Brad Price, Rob Raju, Mitchell Williams, Kaiden Goggin and Brandon Sande. For Sande, these games will be his first meaningful ones since late January, when he suffered a broken arm at the Cats' own tournament.
