The Sun Valley Bantams celebrate their Missoula Blast Off tournament victory Sunday.
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The Missoula (Mt.) Blast Off tournament Nov. 14-16 turned into a real blast for the Sun Valley Bantams (ages 13-14) youth hockey team.
Sun Valley (4-2 season) won three of its four tournament games at Missoula last weekend and came away with the first-place trophy because of a dramatic 1-0 overtime victory over Bozeman in the championship game.
Tom Crosby scored the game winner, unassisted, at the 3:43 mark of the five-minute OT and Sun Valley goalie Gus Conrad (15 saves) earned the shutout victory for the Bantams.
Sun Valley also defeated Park County 6-2 and Missoula 6-3, in addition to suffering a 1-0 loss to Bozeman in preliminary game.
Against Park County, Liam Jablonski scored twice, unassisted, and Crosby added two unassisted tallies. Parker Morris chipped in with a goal, from Crosby, and Calder Zarkos (Riley Sibbach, AJ Rierden) rounded out the Idaho scoring.
Sun Valley outshot Park County 25-14 and goalie Conrad came up with 12 saves in the winning effort.
Too many penalties kept Sun Valley from getting into any offensive flow during the 1-0 loss to Bozeman. Conrad (29 saves) was huge in the net, but Bozeman scored on a third-period power play to take the triumph. Sun Valley managed only 15 shots for the game.
Bouncing back with a vengeance, Sun Valley broke open a 3-3 tie against Missoula with three unanswered goals in the third stanza. Crosby (4 goals) and Parker Weekes (2 goals) did the scoring damage in the 6-3 victory. Assists went to Jablonski and Weekes, and goalie Conrad finished up with 17 saves.
Also skating for the champions were Drew Barsch, Chris Carnes, Chase Hutchinson, Rickie Jeneson, Cameron Jenner, Karel Kaiser, Jon Paris and Drew Punnett.
The coaches were Tim Jeneson, Bob Crosby and Chris Zarkos.
