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This year’s four-team field includes arch rivals Coquitlam Adanacs and Port Coquitlam Saints, who are both looking for B.C.’s first Minto since 2018
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Published Aug 17, 2024 • Last updated 1 minute ago • 4 minute read
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Cody Malawsky is one of the stars of the Coquitlam Adanacs team playing in the Minto Cup Junior A national tournament in Coquitlam this week. Photo by Kerry McGaffney /jpg
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Junior hockey has the Memorial Cup. Junior lacrosse has the Minto Cup.
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The Minto is a four-team Canadian National championship, just like its hockey counterpart that it is contested every spring. Junior A lacrosse has an extra year of eligibility, with players up to age 21.
This latest version of the Minto gets going Saturday at the Poirier Sports and Leisure Complex and features the B.C. arch rival Coquitlam Adanacs and Port Coquitlam Saints, along with the Ontario champion Orangeville Northmen and Raiders Lacrosse of Calgary, who won the Rocky Mountain banner.
Here are five things to know about this Minto:
1. There are assorted ties to the National Lacrosse League, the 15-team winter pro loop that features the Vancouver Warriors. PoCo captain Brayden Laity, who turns 21 in October, played all 18 regular season games this past season with the Warriors, making him one of the youngest regulars in the league. He was one of four first-round picks by Vancouver in last September’s NLL Draft. Another was Orangeville goalie Connor O’Toole, 21, who is expected to debut with the club this coming season.
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PoCo’s coaching staff is headed up by brothers Travis Cornwall, 34, and Jeff Cornwall, 33, who are both longtime NLL defenders. Orangeville’s general manager is Toronto Rock goalie Nick Rose, 36, and the Adanacs coach is Pat Coyle, 54, who holds down the same position with the Colorado Mammoth.
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2. The Northmen acquired O’Toole from the Brampton Excelsiors in a midseason trade. Brampton’s coach happens to the netminder’s father. Pat O’Toole, 52, is a former standout NLL netminder himself, spending the majority of his 16 years in the loop with the Rochester Knighthawks, where he remains an assistant coach. In summer lacrosse, he was based out of Poirier for two seasons (1996-97) with the Western Lacrosse Association’s Coquitlam Adanacs.
3. The Lax Mag published its top-50 junior player list on Friday and four of the top five are slated to play in this Minto: Orangeville’s Joey Spallina (No. 1), Coquitlam’s Ty Banks (No. 3), Orangeville’s Trey Deere (No. 4) and Coquitlam’s Cody Malawsky (No. 5).
Spallina, 21, is from Mount Sinai, N.Y., and had 86 points in 13 Ontario playoff games. This week, he was named to the U.S. team for the senior men’s world championships that take place this September in Utica, N.Y., joining current NLL starts like Tom Schreiber. Spallina plays field lacrosse at Syracuse and this past NCAA season he amassed 88 points, including 37 goals. He was third in the country in scoring, and tops among sophomores.
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4. Ontario doesn’t dominate the Minto like it does with the Mann Cup, the Senior A national championship that their teams have won 15 of the past 16 titles, including the last six in a row. Ontario squads have captured the past three Mintos and nine of the last 12, though. Coquitlam’s won the other three, with the last one coming in 2018 in Calgary. They won it all at Poirier in 2010, with a team coached by Curt Malawsky, father of the current Adanac star and the general manager and coach of the Warriors.
This is the first trip to the Minto for the Saints.
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5. You can get tickets at the Minto website ($23.13 includes fees for 18 and over for round robin games). That’s where you also head to for live streaming, and that will run $20 for a single game webcast or you can get a nine-day tournament pass for $125.
The sport could use more exposure. Ideally, the Canadian Lacrosse Association and other stakeholders would find sponsors to take on the webcast costs and get more eyeballs on the games. That’s not happening as of yet.
There are positives. There’s more unity between the winter and summer brands of the game now. For instance, the Vancouver Canucks, who bought the Vancouver Stealth in 2018 and rebranded them Warriors along with moving them from the Langley Events Centre to Rogers Arena, had Carl Chunta from their media relations department at the Minto press conference Friday night to help out. The Warriors are expected to have a presence at Minto all week. By comparison, the Stealth team didn’t have any involvement in the 2017 Mann Cup in New Westminster.
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Still, there’s much more work to be done in the marketing of the game.
“Do I think the Minto Cup is undersold? Yeah, but to me lacrosse is undersold period,” said Coyle. “To me, the NLL is undersold. How do you change it? You need to get more people seeing the product. I think everyone who’s going to be in this building this week is going to be sold. Hopefully, they go to Warriors games after this.
“I love junior lacrosse. It’s really fast. To me, it’s closer to the NLL than senior lacrosse, with the speed of it. It’s such an enjoyable game to watch. And it’s really nice to coach, with this age group. They’re raw, they’re eager, they’re maybe as not set in their ways as the older guys can be.”
@SteveEwen
SEwen@postmedia.com
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Courtesy : https://theprovince.com/sports/lacrosse/five-things-to-know-about-the-minto-cup-lacrosse