Greyhounds hit break after a roller-coaster first half

The Christmas break has hit the Ontario Hockey League and for the Soo Greyhounds, it’s probably good timing.

A team that has been through a lot of highs and lows in the opening three months of the season, the Greyhounds will enter the break in the thick of things in the OHL’s Western Conference where the 10 teams are separated by 10 points.

Having won seven of eight following a win over the Kitchener Rangers on Friday night, Greyhounds coach John Dean said the Christmas break is still coming at a good time for the team, despite the recent success.

“It feels like we’ve played the full season with the way the season has gone,” Dean said. “These guys have earned the break and need the break. They need to not see my face and hear my voice for five or six days. We don’t want to taste what we tasted there over that bad stretch again.”

For the team, a stretch that saw the team drop 12 games over a 15-game stretch was a learning experience. Since a 3-2 loss on the road to the Flint Firebirds on Nov. 9, the Greyhounds have went 11-4-1-0.

“The last stretch has been good,” Dean said. “It’s been consistent. We’ve had some areas and some periods where we’ve been inconsistent and shown some of our old colours. The important part as a team is that we learn from that tough month and grow from it, which I think we have. How do we make it sustainable? With a consistent approach to our preparation. A consistent approach to our mindset in terms of how we’re going to start games and start periods. More importantly, if we make sure that we learn from that tough stretch, we are so much better for it. If we fall back into some of those habits we had back then, then it’s our own fault for not being better. We’re taking steps in the right direction, but we have had a streaky year so I’m hesitant to say that we’ve gotten over the hump yet. But I like a lot of the things I’m seeing.”

“I feel like that rough patch we had was better for us,” defenceman Billy Constantinou said. “It taught us a good lesson. Losing sucks and all of the guys got sick of it near the end. We took things a little more serious and that was a big factor in how we’ve been doing recently.”

Greyhounds captain Ryan O’Rourke called the slide a feeling the players don’t want to endure again.

“It’s going in the right direction now,” O’Rourke said. “We started out hot, then went down a bit and we’re back up again. Just keeping it in the back of our head that we know how to lose and, going forward, we don’t really want to have that feeling again.”

The sophomore blueliner would also say “We learned how to lose, and we didn’t like it.”

“We’re definitely going to use it as a positive.”

How does the team avoid a similar stretch in the second half?

“It starts with practice,” O’Rourke said. “Coming to practice with an attitude that we have to get better and we have to keep going forward. That losing stretch, those practices weren’t as fun. When we’re having fun at practice, we have fun in the games too.”

The team will return to action on Dec. 28 at home against the Sudbury Wolves. Puck drop at the GFL Memorial Gardens is set for 7:07 p.m.