The Cochrane Generals have seemingly hit their stride in the Heritage Junior Hockey League (HJHL) season after a pair of wins and an overtime set back Nov. 30 through until Dec. 2. With only two regulation losses since Oct. 20, the Generals have tallied 10 wins and 22 points in the 14 games since to boost their record to 12-6-2 on the season. "As long as you can take points away from a game, whether it be an overtime loss or a straight win, it's always nice to have. To have consistency in the line up, have guys working together and communicating, it has done a lot for our program in the last month and especially over this 14-game stretch," said Generals bench boss Travis McMillan. "Hopefully we can continue this trend and push ourselves to get better in the second half of the year to keep this positive streak going. Obviously, there's still a lot of learning yet to be done but we've been doing a lot of video work before practices, slowing things down and really addressing the teaching points of what we need to do and how we need to do them ... it's a positive for sure and having plenty of games left in the season, there's no place to go but up from here." In the first game of a busy weekend, the Generals travelled to High River for a home-and-home with the Flyers. Cochrane jumped out to an early 1-0 lead when Vance Wesley scored a goal with less than a minute to go in the first period, but the lead didn't last long in the second with High River scoring two goals just a minute apart to take a 2-1 lead. Wesley once again came to the rescue potting his second goal of the game at the 2:55 mark of the second knotting the game up at two heading into the third period where Cochrane took over and potted three goals off the sticks of River Ross, Jordan Marks and Braden Bain while Erik Garber shut the door on any Flyers chances for a potential comeback and a 5-2 victory in favour of Cochrane. The team returned home the following night to their digs at the Cochrane Arena to once again tangle with the Flyers in a hard fought overtime game. Braden Bain got the hometown crowd into it midway through the second period with a bullet past the High River goaltender, but the visitors didn't quit and scored a goal to tie the game up and eventually won it in overtime just three minutes into the frame to help the Flyers escape with a 2-1 victory. The Generals finished off the weekend in spectacular fashion with a 9-1 beat down of the Lomond Lakers in Claresholm. Keenan McElroy, Taylor Girard paced the Gens early in the first while Chris Sambrook scored on a buzzer beater after Lomond made it 2-1 with just 34 seconds left. Cochrane kept their foot on the gas pedal scoring two more goals in the second from Jaeden Dowling and Harry Osler before pumping in four more in the third thanks to two goals from Caden Chudleigh, Takuro Okada and Chris Sambrook tallying his second marker of the game. "The first night in High River we played very well. We had a great third period which really helped push the envelope in order to get points on the board so I'm happy about that. It was a battle during the first two periods, but all in all, it was a pretty decent game," McMillan said of his team's performance. "In Saturday's case, with the overtime loss, we ran into another hot goaltender who was actually named athlete of the week ... he's a pretty solid goaltender but I think we also made him look a little bit better than the stats can show. High River is a very fast paced hockey team so they need their goaltender to bail them out and we unfortunately weren't able to find the back of the net. I don't think the boys played bad, we just need to find ways to put the puck in the back of the net." "Heading into Claresholm, I think the boys knew we could have had a strong six-point weekend which would have helped us a lot in the standings, so they needed to put the peddle to the metal and keep it on for three periods which is what we ended up doing and came out with two wins and an overtime loss which is nothing to be mad about, but there's always room for improvement."
