News Report

Coaches thoughts…

Coach Cliff gives his thoughts on our pre-season weekend

• admin
• 09 September 2025

Hi Chieftains Fans,

Welcome back to another season of Chieftains hockey, on one hand it’s seemed like a long time since the end of last season and on the other hand it feels like we were only off for 5 minutes.

Last weekend we had a great warmup weekend against the Solihull Barons which I feel was ideal to get us going for the league campaign against Solent this weekend.

Saturdays game was a really good first effort, we were far from perfect but that’s why you have preseason games and whilst we were comfortable on the scoreboard for most of the game we gave our goalies way too much to do, so we know we will have to tighten up as the games start to be meaningful.

On Sunday we had a pretty good first 30 minutes and then a pretty awful last 30, the boys went about the task with full commitment and nobody took a backwards step, but we hit a wall about half way through the game and it was like we were skating uphill for the rest of the game.

We had some great performances from some young players over the weekend, missing 4 or 5 key senior players is always going to make life a little tricky, but everyone who played did themselves proud and didn’t take a shift off.

The weekend will have done us a lot of good, we will work on the bits we need to this week and be ready to face Solent on Sunday when hopefully we should be back at, or very close to, full strength.

Thanks to everyone who came to the home game or followed us up to the midlands, you certainly made a lot more noise than the home fans which some of their players mentioned to me after the game.

See you at the rink,

Cliff.