St. Charles sandwiched two power-play goals around a tally by Joshua Bryson to take a 3-0 lead 9:03 into the first period. David Tolson scored for Citrus to bring the score within two goals, but Jaron Lutz scored an unassisted goal late in the period to reestablish the Cougars’ three goal cushion.

 

In the second period, St. Charles again scored the first two goals of the period, Citrus answered, and Jaron Lutz closed out the scoring with another late goal for the Cougars, making it 7-2 at the end of the second. The teams traded goals in the third for a final score of 8-3.

 

“We felt like we had the talent to do what we needed to do,” said St. Charles’ Coach Pat Ramshaw. “We just needed to stay disciplined and focused from start to finish, take it one game at a time, one shift at a time. The boys brought it together and stayed out of the box. When we’re four-on-four and not in the box, we can skate with anybody.”

 

Ramshaw said that playing Citrus College earlier in the tournament prepared his team for the final: “We knew that we got on them early in round-robin play, so when we were getting ready for the championship game, we stuck with our game plan – take care of the puck, don’t force it, stay out of the box, back check hard and take care of our opportunities. Once we got one, we started chippin’, kept going and hammered a way at them, and it worked out.”

 

“They came out hard; it seemed that they wanted it a little bit more,” said Chris Scharrar of Citrus College. “We came out a little lazy. We started to pick it up, but they got off to a 6-1 lead, and it’s hard to win a game after that.

 

“We came out a little flat,” said Georgie Barber, Citrus’s captain. “We could have worked a lot harder. We just fell apart really early in the game.”