Montreal Open Recap

A look back on the tournament weekend

The fifth annual Montreal Open took place last weekend in Montreal, Quebec. Salming and FloorballPro were present in full force, setting up a beautiful booth for the Team Canada practices and try-outs and sponsoring most of the teams playing at the event.

The Montreal Open is considered the second best tournament in the country after the Canada Cup and has traditionally been well organized. As a result, the event has welcomed more teams, divisions and players every single year. Unfortunately this year seemed to be a bit of a step back as the tournament was only played in one venue with 11 teams, a couple of them having less than 2 lines of players for some games. There were very few new teams and players. Hopefully next year we'll see a return to two venues and more teams.

On the court, the level of play was the best seen in Montreal for several years, with the Elite and Intermediate divisions both proving to be closely matched. The short 2x12 minute games also helped keep scores down and blowouts were rare.

After the Elite round-robin, it was Montreal Fight Club, the team made up of Montreal Red Light ball hockey stars and three Ontario teams (Vikings and Floorball Club from Toronto and the Ottawa Blizzard) going into the semi-final round. The close games continued, with Vikings beating FCT 1-0 and Fight Club beating Ottawa 4-1. The final was set: Vikings against Fight Club.

In the round-robin, the Vikings were the only team to give Fight Club a challenge, going up 3-1 before losing 5-4. The team had two chances to tie, the first time Mike Woods hit the cross-bar and with three seconds left a questionable penalty call took away Colin Munro's chance to tie it who was alone in front of the net. The Vikings were itching to get another chance at Fight Club, but the experienced and cohesive team proved to be too much for the young Vikings in the final, defeating them 5-0 and securing another Montreal Open crown.

While Fight Club continues to be in a class of their own and deserved the win, the young players on the Vikings, FCT, Ottawa and Young Guns showed they are the future of the sport in Canada. It was awesome to see so many players 25 and under get a chance to play big roles on their respective club teams and show everyone they can compete at the top level. On the Vikings alone, more than half the roster was made up of players under 20 years old - players like Mike Woods, Colin Munro, Jeff Sinkic, Julian Pedis, Dylan Craig, Jordan McColl and goaltender Luke Hare will be names to watch in Canadian floorball circles for at least the next decade. One can only hope they will continue to play floorball and keep bringing their game to a new level of competitiveness in the future.

In the Intermediate round, Montreal's El Fuego beat Toronto's iMove in the final 2-0, giving iMove their second silver medal in two years.

Congratulations to all the teams and players that took part and for the organizers for a good effort. For more details about the tourney, surf to the Montreal Open website at http://floorballquebec.com/node/382

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