The end of the season in the Heritage Junior Hockey League for the Strathmore Wheatland Kings saw the home team headed into the first round of playoffs.

And while the team didn’t advance this year, 2020 will still end on a high for the Kings.

The Kings finished 12-25-1 this season. January 2020 was off to a good start for the team, their first game of the month was a 7 to 0 shutout against the Lomond Lakers. And then another 7 to 6 win over the Rocky Rams on January 11.

In some games, the team would be off by only one or two goals from a win.

Ron West took over as head coach of the Junior B team in December 2019.

“I felt like we needed to work more on the systems of the game. We worked on defensive, we worked on the neutral zone, we worked on the offensive zone and we just brought in more systems of where you need to be,” said West.

The coaching staff held the players accountable to where they needed to be on the ice.

“With that came the advancement of them winning more games,” said West.

“Myself and my coaching staff, we just tried to keep the attitude relaxed, work on things but don’t be hard on them. Just take things and say ‘OK you didn’t do this very well, but you did these three things well.’ Show them with a positive outlook,” he said.

In the first round of playoffs against the Medicine Hat Cubs, the Kings looked like they were turning things around with a 6 to 4 win last Sunday, but with a final 2 to 1 loss on Monday, they were not able to catch up in the best of 5 games series.

“Getting to playoffs was one thing, and making sure that we put in a good competitive effort in playoffs was another,” said West. ‘We had one slip up there, Game 1 was good, we just couldn’t score a goal on them, the goaltender was amazing. Game 2 in Strathmore we didn’t play very good. We were down 2 and 0 and I basically said to them that we have to work hard to beat these guys, so we can go back in front of our fans and have a great game in front of them,” said West. The Kings won Game 3, 6 to 4 in Medicine Hat, but were defeated 2 to 1 in their final game at home.

“We played hard and I was very proud of them because everybody got to see the effort that they were putting in,” said West.

Now the team will wrap up this year with the Strathmore Wheatland Kings awards banquet will be held tentatively in April 2020.