The U14 AA Alberta Sting won all six games they played to capture the gold medal at the Ottawa Capital Classic from June 9 to 11.

The Sting is comprised of girls from multiple communities including Airdrie, Chestermere and Strathmore. Seven of the athletes on the team were from Airdrie.

The Ottawa Capital Classic is one of the biggest Ringette Tournaments in Canada that sees the best of the best of almost all age groups come out to play. The Sting was a team that was put together post-regular season to play at this tournament.

"We trained for two months, had some exhibition games, a bunch of practices. We all headed out to have some fun in Ottawa, both on the ice and do a lot of team building off the ice," explained Jason Nikish, one of the coaches of the team. 

The Sting proved to be a very strong well put together team as they only gave up seven goals in their whole tournament. Nikish had high praise for his team and the performance they put on.

"Our team, we built it to be level, we had extremely strong goaltending. Really good defence in front and then we created really even and dangerous offense where everybody could score. We had contributions from everybody on the team throughout the tournament."

Heading into the playoffs, the Sting played a team called the Wild Cards from Ontario who had one of the top goalies in the country for the U14 age level.

We did everything we could to put some by that young lady, finally got a couple of good goals and we squeaked out a three-one victory in that game which moved us to the gold medal game."

Looking for the gold medal against a team from Quebec that was also undefeated up to this point. The girls faced some adversity early on falling behind in the score.

"Our girl slowly started driving back and regrouped. They started believing in themselves again, they started really putting more effort into beating them in every battle that was on the ice. We managed a 6-3 victory in the end."

Nikish stated the girls worked so hard to win this tournament, that when the final game was over, it meant so much to them.

"When they finally achieved their goal, the excitement that ran through the bench and those girls, if you could just see the energy coming out of them, they were so excited."

While this wasn't a team that played together all regular season, Nikish has never seen a team come together so quickly since he started coaching and couldn't be any prouder.

Nikish does hope to see this team back together next season for many more events.

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