This past weekend Andrew and the Strongsville Mustangs team played in the Rock-N-Roll Cup tournament here in Cleveland. This was supposed to be a four team tournament against evenly matched opponents in a "round-robin" format where each team plays the other once and the top two teams play for the championship. Our first game was against MCYH (Rochester, NY). This was an extremely physical game and, despite outshooting the other team, the Mustangs lost short 0-3. In our second game we played Dayton and lost that one 0-10. In the end, Dayton was disqualified because they won all of their round-robin games by double-digits and were obviously a higher level team that was just "trophy-hunting." That left us in a game 3 match-up against Geauga (our nemesis) to determine which team would face MCYH in the championship game. The Mustangs exploded with a 7-2 victory that was led by Kanzig (#13) who had a hat-trick and an assist. Andrew (#97) was second on the team with three assists. Gaeschke (#81), Eisenaugle (#12), Beaver (#47) and Vandenbusche (#91) all chipped in goals as well with the assists coming from others on the team; and "the kid" Forsythe (#21) was spectacular in goal. The victory setup another physical rematch with MCYH on Sunday. Gower (#20) and Crossman (#87) led the Mustangs with solid "hits" in the game with 5 and 4, respectively. But despite both teams having around the same number of shots on goal, the MCYH goalie was simply too hot (he ended up MVP of tournament) and the Mustangs fell short again by a close score of 0-2. Overall, the kids played tough and earned themselves and extra game as well as the runner-up trophy and medals. Nice job Mustangs!
