The Red Deer TBS Rampage don’t just want to dominate the North this year, they want to take down the South as well.
On Sunday they ran their Rocky Mountain Lacrosse League Junior B Tier I winning streak to five games, beating the Okotoks Marauders 11-7 at the Kinex Arena.
“It’s good to send a message to the Calgary teams and the other side of the league that we’re here to play and we’ve got a good team,” said first year head coach Dustin Reykdal.
The Rampage (5-0-1) were led by Logan Sinclair who scored four goals and an assist, Logan Elliott added three goals while Jordan Waddell, Ryan Beatsch, Blayne Friesen and Levi Whitney added one goal each. Darrian Banack made 23 saves for the win.
The Marauders (1-4-0) responded with two goals from Eric Porter and one each from Gabriel Barton, Nick Barley, Josh Vaines, Taylor McNeill, Aidan Deans. Kyle Vernon stopped 36 shots in the loss.
The Rampage were certainly keyed by the play of Sinclair, fresh off of playing for the Glasgow Clydesiders at the Aleš Hrebeský Memorial tournament in Prague at the end of April.
Reykdal is hoping for more performances like this from Sinclair, who went pointless in his first three games of the year with Red Deer. He had 45 points in 15 games last year with the tier II Renegades.
“It was good to see him step up,” said Reykdal. “We didn’t see much from him the first couple of games of the year, he was out in Prague playing in a lacrosse tournament. We had a good effort from him, normally I stick him out in transition, but we gave him an opportunity in the front gate and he ended up pulling together a very good performance that we can credit a lot of our success from.”
It was not a perfect game for the Rampage, who played well in the first and third periods and flat lined in the middle frame.
But even then Banack picked up the slack, including coming out of his net to break up a late rush by the Marauders as they rallied late.
“It’s one of those growing things when dealing with a young team, they have to understand they have to play the full 60 minutes,” said Reykdal.
Next up for the Renegades is a road trip to the capital region next weekend, playing the St. Albert Crude (2-5-0) on Saturday and the Edmonton Warriors (6-2-0) on Sunday.
• The Renegades dropped their only game of the weekend, falling 11-5 to the Medicine Hat Sun Devils.
• The Lacoka Lacombe Hardware Jr. Locos dropped both of their junior B tier II games on the weekend in Lacombe, falling 15-4 to the Medicine Hat Sun Devils on Saturday and 12-9 to the Calgary Axemen on Sunday.