MOOSE JAW -- It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to fans, but the Moose Jaw Warriors aren’t taking how things went in their 2024-25 campaign very lightly.
After winning the Western Hockey League championship the season prior, the Warriors went on to post a 15-45-6-2 record, finishing in last place in the Eastern Conference and missing the playoffs.
Part of that, of course, was Warriors general manager Jason Ripplinger doing everything in his power to restock the wealth of draft picks the team dealt on their way to winning the WHL Championship, a project that is now largely completed after a single season.
Now, it’s time to take a positive step in the right direction -- and that all started on Wednesday as the KCS Marketing Training Camp kicked off at the Temple Gardens Centre.
There are a ton of new faces around the rink, too, with around 110 players taking the ice through a series of rookie camp and main camp scrimmages throughout the week, culminating in the Red Grey Intrasquad Game on Sunday night.
“We obviously want to forget about last year and this is a new year and we have a lot of players coming in for training camp,” Ripplinger said on the first Inside the Hangar episode of the season. “It's going to be a competitive camp and we're looking forward to it.”
With so many players taking part, it’s going to be busy times at Temple Gardens Centre. Wednesday alone featured five main camp practices and four rookie camp scrimmages and that schedule will continue through to Saturday’s first full day of main camp, which will feature scrimmages at 9 a.m., 10:45 a.m., 3 p.m. and 4:45 p.m.
“We've given them more games this year so we're going to evaluate them more,” Ripplingher said of the expanded schedule. “It’s probably too big of a camp, but just with the NCAA opening up, things will probably change next year. But we're looking forward to watching all the players play.”
The idea with more scrimmages is to get a better feel of how players perform in game situations.
“We didn't want to watch them in practice because obviously there's players that are practice players and we want to watch these players in games,” Ripplinger explained. “So they're going to have enough games to prove themselves.”
The team is also looking for an uptick in intensity in a quest to raise the level of their overall game.
“It has to be hard,” Ripplinger said. “There's not going to be any days off. We need to change how things were from last year… it's a new year and we've got to look forward. We can't look at the past.”
The Red and Intrasquad Game takes place on Sunday at 5 p.m., with entry by donation to the Canadian Mental Health Association. All ice times throughout the weekend are open to the public.
