The first thing every year on the minds of Huron Hockey players is the Dan Jilek tournament. The chance to win the tournament and beat their biggest rivals makes it one of the most anticipated and exciting parts of the season. The Jilek Tournament is an annual high school hockey event at Ann Arbor Ice Cube Arena. Four teams including Huron, Skyline, Pioneer, and Father Gabriel Richard, compete in a round-robin format and the team with the best record wins the Dan Jilek Cup.
This year, the tournament took place in mid-December. With minimal team experience and chemistry early in the season, the teams go almost immediately into playing some of the biggest games of their year. With Huron’s 17 -player roster and only three of them being seniors, it makes it an even bigger challenge. The majority of the team is made up with Juniors and sophomores creating a young and at times inexperienced roster to try to create team chemistry with.
Huron was only able to win one game this year in the Jilek despite a strong effort from the team beating only Skyline. Huron lost to both FGR and the eventual winners of the cup, Pioneer. Despite the sour outcome for the team, they were able to learn from their losses
“We learned many things from the tournament but the biggest thing we took away from it is that we have to show up to play, we cannot show up expecting to win games,” senior captain Kyle Fu said.
Fu feels that the tournament brings many emotions to the players as it means a lot to them. He feels that the emotions have a large range in these types of games. It can bring a lot of excitement to the team and give a lot of energy to the players and like any other sport, can bring sadness. He feels that it is very important to control your emotions in these games because they can take control over the game.
“Our goal for the tournament was to win it all but came up short,” Fu said. “Something we were able to do well though was to stay positive and keep moving forward no matter what was happening. Something we struggled with was not always playing to our expectations.”
Huron looks to break their winning drought in the tournament next year as they havent won the title in over 20 years. With their seven juniors on the team, they are constantly developing and growing the program to ensure they can create future success against the tough opponents involved in the competition. Overall they look to learn from their mistakes and build on the close relationships the team has developed as well as the impressive culture of the team.
“It is such a great team to be a part of because everybody feels like they’re apart of something, essentially everybody feels like they help create something,” Senior captain Caleb Patterson said.
This year they sit with a 5-12 record as they have had recent struggles finding ways to win so they look to turn that around as they come down the final stretch of the season.
