Moose Jaw Generals head coach and GM Ray Wareham didn’t have anything bad to say about his team’s main camp.
Which is saying something in itself.
Never one to mince words, Wareham was happy with the effort and the quality of the play on display at Mosaic Place over the weekend.
“I thought it was pretty good and Saturday was really good,” said Wareham. “For the most part I thought they were pretty good and worked pretty hard.”
It was a busy weekend with three games, a practice session and fitness testing all compressed into two days. The camp concluded with Team White beating Team Red 6-3 in the Red-White game.
Many of the vacant roster spots had been filled at the Generals spring camp. That allowed Wareham the chance to invite a number of 1998-born second-year bantams to camp with an eye towards the 2013-14 season.
Some of those youngsters made a pretty positive impression.
“I thought for 1998-born kids Kolby Johnson and Branden Klatt looked pretty good. For the older guys, I thought Ben Duperreault was good all weekend long,” said Wareham. “Other than that I thought the other guys did what we expected them too.”
Johnson, who hails from Kindersley, Klatt, a local product, and defenceman Dawson Davidson from Melville could be part of a group that will get to play some exhibition games with the Generals.
The Generals will open the pre-season with a home-and-home with Regina on Sept. 9-10. The following weekend they will travel to Calgary to play the Edge Academy for three games from Sept. 14-16. They will conclude the pre-season with a pair of games against Notre Dame the following week.
“We’re doing something a little different this year,” said Wareham of the three-game exhibition series in Calgary.
“We’ll probably take some of those ’98 boys and give them some exhibition games and go from there. That’s the hope anyway. There will be some bantam tryouts around the same time too, so it depends who we get. We would like to take four or five of the ’98s.”
