The Sarnia Sting ended their series of pre-season games in the Ontario Hockey League with a record of 4 - 1 after downing the Spitfires 4 - 2 at the RBC Centre Friday night.

"It was kind of sloppy." Head Coach Trevor Letowski said "The pucks seem to be bouncing quite a bit and it wasn’t a ton of flow early in the game." 

Windsor's Logan Brown opened the scoring at 13:36 in the first period to take a 1 - 0 lead that remained after twenty minutes of play.

Sting rookie Jordan Kyrou scored an early goal in the second for the Sting to tie things up.  Windsor would regain the lead after Aaron Juchuk scored.  Kyrou answered back with his second goal of the night just seconds over the halfway point in the period. 

"You can see he’s (Kyrou) a smart hockey player I think he’s gotten better as training camp went on here and scored a couple of nice goals." Letowski said  "I think he’s going to contribute offensively for us and he’s going to push for ice time.  You don’t get that from a 16 year old too often.".

Letowski also added "It's exciting for us that were going to have at least two sixteen year olds in our line up (Kyrou and Jakob Chychrun) that are going to play possibly significant roles not just bit players so that’s good for us. We like what we have up the middle and the gutsy kind of pushing each other for ice time right now."

A minute and twenty two seconds later Ryan Vendramin would give the Sting their first lead of the game by scoring the eventual game winner and then added his second goal in the third.

"The message after the second was lets try to manage the puck right and play simple game here in the third and try to get a win and we were able to do that so it wasn’t a great game but it was ok." 

Jakob Chychrun, Pavel Zacha and Alex Renaud assisted on the goals.
 

Spitfires goalie Brendan Johnston made 31 saves. Justin Fazio turned away 27 of 29 and was replaced by Sarnia Native Steven Taylor in the final 10 minutes in the period. 

Taylor, from Sarnia who played Major Midget ‘AAA’ hockey for the Lambton Jr. Sting in 2012-2013 and 14 games for the Mooretown Flags in 2013-2014 will be suiting up with the Dresden Kings Jr C in 2014- 2015.
 

"I think he was excited to get in and he played good, it was nice to see." Letowski said   "He’s from around here so I think just having him in our backyard in case of injury and things like that we wouldn’t hesitate to bring him back."

Letowski says that overall they are happy with where they are at after the preseason games.

"We’ve been doing a lot of teaching and implementing our system and we’ve seen progress.  It’s a different feel to our team this year from the coaching staff down and there’s an expectation to win hockey games I think the players feel that."

"What I see we have a pretty close knit group and our veteran players kind of bought in to what we want to do this year. I think it’s important that if we are going to win a championship here that’s a key element to our team is that we have to be close and care about each other. I feel that coming from our group right now."

The Sting's season opener is on the road on with their first game in Sault Ste. Marie on Friday September 26 then the next night they are in Saginaw.  The home opener is set for Friday October 3.

"We have a lot to work on our system play we want to be a very detailed structure hockey team this year and it’s going to take awhile for these guys to get exactly how we want them to play so we are just going to continue to work on that. 

Letowski also added "Conditioning is a factor and we have to push the pace some days just to get a tempo to keep them well condition and in game shape.  Do some battle drills and things like that I think for me as a former player I remember it’s not easy when you don’t play a game for two weeks so we have to try to simulate some game situations also."