Welcome back.
I hope you enjoyed summer, because the serious stuff starts now. Are you ready to get your heart broken all over again? Me neither.
I don’t know about you, but I’m looking to keep heartbreak to an absolute minimum this year, and I think there’s plenty of reasons to be hopeful when it comes to the Haringey Huskies this time around.
It’s one of the most exciting rosters I’ve seen, in potentially one of the most exciting seasons. New faces, new teams. I love the unknown of it all, I love the anticipation, the intrigue. There’s a lot that’s different this year.
I love that I know perishingly little about our new signings. I love that there’s a very good chance that they become the new heroes for the Haringey faithful come April next year.
You probably followed the announcements as I did. The names just kept coming through. Josh Ealey-Newman from the Streatham Redhawks, Ruskin Springer Hughes from the Invicta Dynamos. A return for James Pentecost after years away. Johan Persson from Oxford City Stars. All players for the here and now, and who you’d expect to make an instant impact.
A lot of players have mentioned the ‘s’ word in their signing notes, and from the activity over the summer I get the impression that the club feels this could be their year; it’s hard to find evidence to the contrary. General Manager Lee Mercer said it would be a new look Haringey this season, and he wasn’t wrong.
No James and Matt Hepburn. No Bryn Griffiths. No Joe Willingham. No Cass McCormack. No Corey Taylor. No Bradley Hildreth. No Ben Beldecos. Some big names in there and Haringey stalwarts to boot.
But it’s a sign of the direction of travel and aspirations of the club that they’ve attracted and signed so much talent from South 1. Josh Ealey-Newman spoke about being sold the vision for the future of Haringey Huskies Ice Hockey Club, and the trajectory off the ice is certainly on the up and up, with the jumbotron added to the rink at the end of last season.
It’s never easy of course, but they’ve given themselves every possible chance of success on the ice with the team they’ve put together. And that includes the players stepping up from the Haringey Hounds.
Shaddai Twumasi had a .913 and .914 save percentage last year for the Haringey Hounds U18 and U19s respectively. Will Nowik, captain of the U19s, put up an astonishing 56 points across 11 league games, with 33 goals and 23 assists. Ouch. Carl Etuazim joins as the youngest player in the squad at 16.
If there’s any complaints you might have wanted another body in at D, but I suspect we’ll see either Luke Martin or Matt Ganas there, or both.
The triumvirate of Matt France, James Pentecost, and Stuart Appleby as player-coaches this year marks a new direction for the club, and one that could certainly bear fruit. Three very experienced guys who know the club and players inside-out, as well as the opposition too. After struggling to find a permanent coaching setup after the Sampson brothers stepped down, this could be the perfect in-house solution.
There’s also two new faces in South 2. Slough are putting out a brand new team in the Spitfires. Scott Anda and Bradley Hildreth have already made the trip down the M4. They must have one of the younger rosters in the league and it’ll be interesting to see how they get on.
And Milton Keynes Thunder opted to step down from South 1 and bring South 2 up to 12 teams for 2025/26. After a challenging few years this reset may bring some needed relief and feel-good factor. I enjoyed the South 2 guide they put out for their fans, but what can we expect from them? We know that Corey Taylor will be icing, and they’ve picked up ex-Bristol Pitbulls 2 netminder Aaron Burton as well as Xander Robinson who delivered the dagger blow in the 2023/24 playoff-final for Basingstoke.
I expect Guildford and Peterborough to both go again. Invicta will be a nuisance as ever and have brought back the very impressive James Laming. The Canucks add Steve Osman who was in that title-winning Bristol side in 2022/23.
Oxford look strong this year too, adding experience in the shape of Matt Lawday, Dan Williams, Will Birch, and Tom Ravenscroft.
And more teams means more games of course. The Huskies play on 14 of the next 15 weekends, taking us all the way up to December 7th. How many of those I get to with an 8-month-old remains to be seen!
The two pre-season games against Altrincham and Sutton will give us a better idea about how this Huskies team will shape up. There’ll be changes to lines simply due to the number of bodies in and out the door, and I’m interested to see who’ll make up those first two lines with the departures of Stephen Woodford and Ben Beldecos.
I cannot wait. After several years of near misses, this season represents serious potential for success. If they can be as good as they look on paper, if they can cut out the inconsistencies, if they can put it on other teams and take games away on the scoreboard, if they can stop the heartbreak, there’s no reason why they can’t win and win convincingly on all fronts this year.
The season starts next weekend. Let’s see how it goes and take it from there.
LET’S GO HUSKIES
