With the boys’ varsity hockey season soon approaching, we sat down with head coach Tyler Jundt, assistant coach Kevin Glueckert, and senior forward Chance Johnson to get their outlook on the season.

The season is going to be exciting, but it’s looking to have some challenges. Practice officially starts November 6th.

“I’m just excited to see where we start and where we finish as a team–and the improvements we make,” stated third-year head coach Tyler Jundt. “We graduated nine guys last year, and we are hopefully going to bring in nine sophomores this year; there’s gonna be a lot of teaching to be done, and a lot of learning from the players.”

After finishing eighth in league standings with a 8-16-1 overall record and not placing at WDA, there is room for improvement.

Senior Chance Johnson is hoping to make improvements that will lead the team to placing at WDA; as he stated when asked about his expectations on the season, “I would love to make WDA without a play-in game and then hopefully advance to state.”

“Strength wise we are happy with where we are at with our goaltending situation. We are returning Jay Lambert, who will be a junior this year. He played every game as a sophomore last year. He really made a lot of good improvements and played really well at the end of the year. From a weakness standpoint we did graduate nine seniors–and a lot of them played defense for us–so we are going to have a few young guys play the blue line, which is gonna lead to some mistakes early, but hopefully we will learn from those mistakes and be a better hockey team at the end of the year,” stated Jundt when we asked about his thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of this year’s season. Both coaches and Chance are hoping for improvements this season.

However, the team won’t be seeing improvements if they don’t follow the coach’s expectations. For example, Coach Jundt says, “We will have a level of accountability, and guys are gonna show up and work hard everyday, and we are gonna improve because of that, and I hope we play our best hockey in February.” Also assistant coach Kevin Glueckert expects the boys to be competitive any time on the ice: “Be competitive every shift of every game and in every practice.”

We asked Jundt, Glueckert, Chance Johnson, and also the school principal, Mr. Germundson, if they have anything they want the Coyote Community to know and most of them had similar responses. They want everyone to come out and support them and all other WHS athletics. If you want the schedule for the season see below. So as Mr. Germundson put it, “Come out to the Agri and cheer loud and proud!!”