By Joe Kiesa and Angela Bussone<\/p>\n
Staff Writers<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the past we always said that we were gonna do good in (the state tournament) but we have always sucked,\u201d says Jamesville-DeWitt High School freshman Jack Austin. \u201cThis year we did what we always said we were gonna do.\u201d Austin is a defenseman for the Onondaga Thunder Bantam Travel team, who are the 2013 New York State Tier III 14u championship team. Along with Austin, there are two other J-DHS freshmen on this club team: Liam Sherwood and Will Eimas- Dietrich. All players on the team are local, and a majority are from Fayetteville- Manlius, Westhill, and Christian Brothers Academy.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI don’t think that I have ever been so nervous for a game in my life,\u201d says Dietrich about playing in the state championship game that was held in Amherst, NY which is near Buffalo. \u201cOur coach (Robert Padula), in the beginning of the season, told us that our goal was to win states. To win states and go beyond to regionals is surreal,\u201d says Dietrich. The championship game ended with the Thunder on top by five. Most championship games would usually have a closer score than this, but the team utilized everything that they had learned throughout the year in the game. The team had a notable performance from their forward Ben McCreary who had a hat-trick, and who is a freshman at CBA. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe best part of the game was the last 30 seconds, because that\u2019s when when we knew it was over because we were up by so much,\u201d says Sherwood. Austin describes their game as \u201cjust fundamental hockey, we just played our game.\u201d Most of this team has played together for a long time so they had an advantage against most other teams where a lot of the kids haven\u2019t played with each other before. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n After the state tournament, the team moved on to the regional tournament where they represented NYS and played representatives from other states around the Northeast. The Thunder did well enough to make it to the regional finals, but were defeated by the Maine Black Bears. The score of the finals was four to nothing.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Joe Kiesa and Angela Bussone Staff Writers \u201cIn the past we always said that we were gonna do good in (the state tournament) but we have always sucked,\u201d says Jamesville-DeWitt High School freshman Jack Austin. \u201cThis year we did what we always said we were gonna do.\u201d Austin is a defenseman for the Onondaga […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jdrampage.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jdrampage.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jdrampage.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jdrampage.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jdrampage.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jdrampage.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jdrampage.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jdrampage.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jdrampage.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}