The 2019 Allan Cup begins Monday in Lacombe, Alberta and the South East Prairie Thunder will play their round robin opener against the host Generals.

“It’s really exciting,” said goaltender Steve Christie who backstopped the Prairie Thunder to their 2015 Allan Cup championship in Clarenville, Newfoundland & Labrador. “You don’t get a taste of it much during the season and then when you start to get a few practices in and get through Manitoba and start to read up on who you’re going to be playing against and the buzz that surrounds the host team’s city, the adrenaline starts to get going a bit.”

The Prairie Thunder won their first Canadian Senior AAA Championship in 2012 in Lloydminster, Saskatchewan.

After losing in overtime to the Bentley Generals in the 2016 final in Steinbach, South East came up short in the last two semifinals 8-4 to Lacombe and 5-2 to the Stoney Creek Generals.

“It’s definitely a little different team this year,” Christie said. “We have a lot of new faces. Some of those new faces are actually returning guys who have played in the past. I think it’s more of a veteran team than we’ve had maybe in the past couple of years so guys kind of know what the Allan Cup is about. We’ve got a couple of guys that actually played on other teams the past few years at the Allan Cup. We have guys that know what it’s about and what it takes at that level. It’s an exciting time and I think we can compete there.”

“Everybody has kind of come from a similar back ground in terms of college and pro hockey,” added Christie. “The mentality is and where everybody is at is they still love the game and they love to play at a high level. When they get a chance to play with players who are as good if not better than, it just kind of flows naturally, back to that high level of hockey where we’ve all kind of come from. It makes the game easy and it makes it real fun and exciting.”

The Prairie Thunder will play their final round robin game on Wednesday against the Haut-Madawaska Panthers.

Christie says in order to be successful they’ll need to be patient and stick to their systems this week in Lacombe.

“We don’t get to play together all year like almost every single team there does so we got to be patient, pick our spots, capitalize on our chances when we do get them and just kind of frustrate the other teams like we have in the past when we’ve been successful there.”

The top team in each Division advance to the semifinals while the second and third place teams will play in the quarterfinals.

photo courtesy Doug Mathieson