Hull Seahawks staying grounded as they strive to end wait for NIHL National silverware
THEY may be the first team to have beaten NIHL National leaders Milton Keynes Lightning inside 60 minutes this season - but there is little chance Hull Seahawks will have got carried away this week.
As head coach Matty Davies was quick to point out in the moments shortly after his team’s 5-1 win at Hull Ice Arena, nothing is won in October.
There may have been - as Davies remarked - a ‘couple of shandies’ had on Sunday night, but it was quickly back to business as usual in East Yorkshire this week, with the build-up to this weekend the same as it has been every single week before.
Don’t dwell on what’s happened - good or bad. Keep moving forward is the mantra.
These days, the majority of the Seahawks roster are on the ice four times a week ahead of a weekend’s action, the next 48 hours bringing an always-testing trip to Solway on Saturday night before an early-morning return in order to get ready for the first tussle of the season with Yorkshire rivals, Sheffield Steeldogs.
Davies has made no secret of his ambition this season for the Seahawks to finally get their hands on the club’s first-ever piece of silverware.
He and fellow owner Joe Lamplough are into season five of the project they started together in the Spring of 2022.
It has been a rough ride at times, particularly the first season which they freely admit they went into underprepared - both on and off the ice - and, even last season, when they had to content themselves with being runners-up in both league and play-offs.
But last season also showed how close the Seahawks were to achieving their silverware dream. It meant only minor tweaks were needed to a roster that had come so close to delivering.
Davies has an enormous amount of faith in the group of players he currently has in his charge.
He has confidence they are capable of winning something and while he may stop short of making any bold, specific predictions, there is a sense of growing self-belief at Hull Ice Arena.
Part of Davies’ job as head coach is to instil that self-belief in his players, while at the same time never allowing that to spill over into over-confidence.
“To keep a group hungry and for them to keep coming back every week and wanting to get better and improve, they've got to know that they can actually win,” said Davies.
“So, them understanding and knowing and thinking that they can actually win, I think that's a good thing.
“It's way harder when you're a 4th, 5th, 6th place team to be fully pumped up every week because at the end of the day, no matter how hard you play, you just know you're not going to win that league because it's just impossible to. That's hard to motivate. That's difficult. That is hard.
“Right now, they've got to be good every week - not just last week, which they were - and they know that.
“It's about doing that every week, going into a new week and just repeating it and going again and again and again.
“We've got a good group here and I think that's the key. They're grounded and, if they're not, and they get a bit ahead of themselves, then they get told pretty quickly.
“There's just no one in the team that is like that.”
Having come so close last season - finishing second in the regular season standings represented the team’s best-ever such finish - Davies realised there would be no need for a summer rebuild, no need to start all over again.
“This year wasn’t about ripping it up and starting again,” he explained. “It was about taking what we did probably from February onwards and just making it better - adding the players that I think we needed to add and just kind of refining all the details and just making sure that we're more or less the same team - just better.
“From my point of view now, it feels like we've been doing this quite a long time. That's just what I feel in terms of the group that I've got.
“There's a familiarity within the group - essentially, it's the same team. We've got the same D-core, we've got very similar lines. We've got basically three, maybe four new players that have come in. That's it.
“It's a process. There's been a lot of things that I've learned, on what works, what doesn't work.
“I've obviously always had in my mind how I want this team to play and I think that's slightly changed over the past year or so. It's not changed completely, it's just about understanding more what it takes to win in this league.
“You've just got to keep knocking on the door, keep improving.
“Every week we've got to improve and that's one thing that I'm big on with this lot. It must be tiring for them to constantly hear me talk about these things all the time, week in, week out.
“But at the end of the day, it's always worth it when you win.”