The Steinbach Millers captured gold this past weekend during the Millers Silver Stick Pee Wee tournament.

Six teams competed in the top tiered A division including, Red Lake, Gimi, Lorette, Winkler, Altona and the home team from Steinbach.

Coach Joel Hartung explains how the team is made up of experience and youth. "We feature only 4 major age players (second year pee wee's born in 2004) with the remaining spots being filled by minor aged players (first year pee wee's born in 2005). With this younger line up, we've dedicated to playing as a team and not individuals."

Hartung also talked about how the weekend will have a much greater positive impact going forward for his team. "This past weekend really exemplified the power of team sports and the examples it provides to children, putting team before self. Especially going into the gold medal game, we were probably 3 or 4 goal underdogs. We asked the boys to trust that each of them would get the job done."

The Millers started the tournament beating Red Lake Ontario 5-1 on Friday night. They continued to roll downing Altona 7-3 to lock up first place in their round robin pool.

In the semi finals, Lorette gave Steinbach all they could handle but the Millers edged out a gutsy 3-2 win to advance to the finals.

Steinbach put on a scoring display in the gold medal game and doubled up Gimil with a final of 6-3.

With a gold medal around his neck, the smile and memories were not lost on coach Hartung, even if his voice took a beating. "It was a joy to coach. It goes to show how they are improving as a team and how they have bought into the coaching. They are a great group of kids. It's nice the weekend is over, my voice is shot!".

Players:

#1 Jaxon Loewen

#2 Cody Neufeld

#4 Troy Friesen

#5 Philipp Meinhardt

#8 Bauer Kasdorf

# 9 Rylen Koop

#10 Job Peters

#13 Gavin Pidsadny

#14 Lewis Hartung

#15 Haiden Willis

#16 Theoren Koop

#17 Ty Paisley

#31 Khean Koeuth

Coaches:

Joel Hartung

Nolan Koop