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***sköldpaddor*** · 04-23-2019, 09:07 AM

Blog Post 7: April 23

KELOWNA, BC --- Hey everybody, me again! It has been a while since my last update here, and as always, a ton of stuff has happened since then, so I’ll give you the recap! It’s all been really great stuff that’s been happening, and I don’t even know what to be most excited about, so I’m just going to go in order of what happened first.

The last time I wrote was just before the draft, and I was pretty nervous about that. There were a whole lot of rumors floating around, and even though I was pretty sure where I was going to end up going, for some reason the nerves didn’t quit, even after I heard my name called and it was done. (If you missed it, I got drafted second overall by the Tampa Bay Barracuda, which is very very exciting) and I hardly slept at all that night because even after everything was over I was back at the hotel totally high on adrenaline. There was so much buildup to that and then suddenly it was over and I had to focus back on the things in the immediate future.

Before I move on from the draft, though, I do want to say that I’m completely thrilled to be going to Tampa (even if it doesn’t happen right away, because I still have work to do here in Kelowna). People (cough cough Tony) have been talking some trash but everybody I’ve spoken to on the team has been so incredibly welcoming and nice to me so far and I’m not even playing there yet, so I’m pretty excited for the future. Sasha will probably be playing for West Kendall by the time I go to Tampa, and even though that means our teams are kind of rivals, it also means we won’t be too far apart geographically so that’s pretty cool. Dima got drafted by San Francisco though so I’m trying not to think too hard about how he’s going to be on the other side of the country when we’re all called up. (Caring about people is totally worth it and I wouldn’t want it any other way, but it also means it’s a real bummer when you have to be far away from them.)

Okay. Enough mushy stuff for now. On to the next thing. I got to play for Sweden at world juniors and with the big squad too, and that was pretty awesome even though we didn’t do so great in either of the tournaments. It’s always fun to get to play with guys I don’t usually get to play with, even if we aren’t winning as much, because I think it keeps me on my toes and reminds me not to get complacent and predictable. We’re a lot smaller than some of the other countries’ teams, but that means guys like me who are still pretty young get to play on the main squad and that’s a really cool experience.

After worlds I went home to Sweden for a while and got to spend some time with my family. That was great - I got to see all my little nieces and nephews and all my sisters and my parents. There are a bunch of birthdays in our family in the summer, so I also got to eat a lot of cake (and then I went to the gym to make up for eating all of the cake). Sasha and Dima came over for a little bit at Midsummer and I got to show them around and me and my sisters made them take selfies wearing flower crowns and we all had a really great time. I also went to Ireland for a couple days and trained some with Corey and Jax. Corey has a huge dog and she’s great but I did not realize that she also likes to go hunting, so I went hunting for the first time in my life. After I figured out what was going on, I had a lot of fun. It’s always so cool to be out in nature and seeing all the wildlife (and eating some of the wildlife later, because it turns out Corey is actually good at hunting and cooking the stuff he catches).

After all that, I finally came back to Canada to get back into training with the whole team before the season. Training camp went pretty well, I feel like I learned a lot and I think we all got a little bit more used to the way the locker room feels without the guys who got called up this season. It’s weird without them, but it felt like it also really made a bunch of us step up, and even though those are really big shoes to fill. I tried really hard to help the new guys feel as welcome as I did when I first got here, and to get everybody as pumped as I could for the new season. I think we all know things are going to be a little harder now, but I know how hard absolutely everybody on this team works and I didn’t want anybody to feel discouraged so early on.

I guess everybody appreciated that, because we had the votes for team leadership and they made me captain?! I’m so completely blown away by that. For everybody to trust me with that after I’ve only been on the team one season, it’s a huge honor and it also makes me feel like it hasn’t gone unnoticed how I’ve tried to be a positive presence in the locker room. It didn’t really feel real until I went in yesterday and saw my jersey with the C on it, and I guess it’s still sinking in. I don’t want to make a huge deal out of it or sound like I’m bragging about it or anything, but it means a lot to me and I’m going to do my best to live up to it.

We also had team awards and I don’t want to go on about that too long either because this also feels like bragging about myself but I got some really great ones. I got one for dedication to the team and one for embodying what it means to be a Knight. The thing is, I knew going into last season that I wasn’t going to be putting up huge numbers and playing a lot of minutes. That’s something I’ve been working towards, obviously, but I knew that with how absolutely loaded with talent our team was, that wasn’t really going to be my role on the ice, so I put a lot of effort into being a team player and making myself valuable in other ways, and this feels like kind of a validation of that - it feels like recognition that I accomplished what I set out to do, so I’m really happy about it.

And that’s all I’m going to ramble about me and my feelings for now, because here we are going into the regular season. Guys have gone up, and I’ve moved up a line, so I anticipate working even harder to show the rest of the league that even with some new faces and missing a few of the ones they’re used to, the Knights are still a force to be reckoned with. I couldn’t be more excited for what we have ahead of us, and I'm pumped to get S47 started!

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