The Diamond Energy Female Midget AAA Wildcats will be represented by a pair of forwards and their head coach on Team Sask's U18 Female Team for the not-so-distant 2019 Canada Winter Games in Red Deer, Alberta.

Carissa Hogan, Taylor Lind, and coach Terry Pavely will be in Alberta later this winter for the Games, which run February 15 to March 3, 2019.

Hogan

For Carissa Hogan, who converted to forward from the back end in her rookie year, it's the first time representing her province on the national stage.

"That's a huge experience for me I think going into that. I'm definitely looking forward to it. Having a Team Sask jersey on, I'll have a lot of pride to have that jersey on, and to take away on that experience."

Hogan is now into her third year with the Wildcats. The first, she posted four assists in 22 games on the blueline. She then rattled off 12 goals and 24 points in 28 games last season with the Wildcats.

In her final Female Midget AAA season, Hogan has six points in 12 games so far with Swift, and says she looks forward to having team captain Taylor Lind along with Pavely on the bench for the Winter Games.

"The moral support, and going into that having a teammate and head coach by your side, that means a lot. Looking up to Taylor, she's definitely a great role model to me," said Hogan. "(Terry) definitely motivates you, he'll push me, and definitely make me want to push myself - every shift, work hard day in, day out."

Still looking for a shot at a university or college hockey offer, Hogan says these sorts of opportunities provide a great ability to showcase her game.

"Moving forward, I definitely hope I can play post-secondary hockey," she said. "Definitely (want) to make sure someone can see what's happening."

Lind

It's already the second stint on Team Sask's U18 squad for the 16-year-old Lind, after she and then-captain Taylor Kirwan were with the team in November, 2017 for the National Women's Under-18 Championships in Quebec City.

"It's going to be a huge honour to get to go up to Red Deer, and represent Team Saskatchewan on a bigger scale than last year," said Lind, who once again has a teammate along with her on the national stage. "It's something amazing. It's awesome just being a part of that, but being able to share it with some of your close friends that you get to be with all year, you can't explain it."

Lind says, as Kirwan did for her last year, she's going to help Hogan glide through the feeling-out process that tends to happen in the first taste of the national stage.

"I'm just going to help her, keep pushing her every drill in practice. Off ice, we're going to work really hard. I think going in, it's a huge deal to be there, but we're just going to say we aren't just satisfied going."

One thing Lind noted as a bit of an oddity that took some getting used to last year, was donning the same jersey as opponents from the SFMAAAHL.

"The first year it was pretty strange just going up against those girls that you never always got along with, especially being one of the more gritty players on the ice after the whistles. But, after playing with lots of the girls that are returning from last year, I know quite a few of them pretty well, and I'm excited to get to know them even better, it brings a lot of diversity."

However, that scenario of setting aside past battles to become teammates and friends is part of what makes it such a rewarding experience.

"It's something you never thought you'd be able to experience. It's not something you joined hockey to be able to do, but it's one of the best parts about it - getting to know the girls, and getting to go see parts of things that you never would have expected," said Lind.

Lind is in the midst of her third-consecutive team-leading season on the stat sheet.

After 58 and 52-point seasons in her first two years in the league, the Shaunavon product currently has 20 points in 12 games this year.

She's now comfortably in the lead as the Wildcats all-time leading scorer with both 72 goals and 130 points, and that 130 point total sits in a tie for sixth in the SFMAAAHL's all-time list.

Pavely 

Behind the bench, Terry Pavely is again looking forward to serving as Team Sask's head coach, coaching a pair of his players on the national stage.

"I think it's always nice when kids from our program are recognized for their skills, the way they've been playing throughout the year. It's a testament to those kids - at the end of the day they work hard, they do their job," he said.

Pavely is joined on the bench by assistant coaches Greg Slobodzian and Tegan Schroeder. Slobodzian is the current head coach of the powerhouse Saskatoon Stars, while Schroeder was the head coach of the Notre Dame Hounds last season.

When it came time to narrow down the list as the latter half of 2018 wound down, even representation from across the SFMAAAHL enabled the best insight for the best roster.

"It's a collective group of people that pick that team. Obviously there's three coaches that are on the bench, but we have a video coach that did a lot of scouting for us in the first half of the season, our head scout, we did some scouting. Even this weekend in Notre Dame we had a number of bodies there besides the coaches picking teams."

For Pavely, it can sometimes be a double-edged sword, so to speak, when providing input on his own players, which is where that balanced input comes into play.

"For the kids who are on our team, there's some positives and some negatives. Of course I can speak for their character, but sometimes as a coach you notice the negatives in your own players a little bit more, because you're always trying to correct. You see them day in, day out, and sometimes when they're only evaluated on their game play, players do have an advantage," he said.

"I think that was the nice thing about our staff this year. We had a number of people watching games in the first half of the season. It was a pretty fair evaluation of all the kids - a collective evaluation, all the kids had a lot of opportunities to be seen."