From a tournament without a single goal to a bronze medal, the Ontario Phoenix at the 2026 USA Ball Hockey Future Stars Invitational
A year ago, the goal was simple. Score. Just once. Just one ball over the line.
It never came.
When the Ontario Phoenix arrived at the 2025 Future Stars Invitational, they came as newcomers and underdogs (a first-year program stepping onto a stage full of teams that had been building for years). It was a weekend of lessons more than results. As the tournament wore on, the ambition shrank to something almost humble: put one in the net, just to know they could. The scoreboard never gave them that. They went home without a single goal to their name.
But they didn’t go home empty. They left with something harder to measure… a hunger. A quiet promise that if they came back, they’d come back ready.
Building the team
That promise fell on Matt Soper, and he carried it for months. He recruited everywhere… at events, through parents, working every corner of the ball hockey world he could reach to give this team a real chance. Piece by piece, it started to take shape.
The moment it truly began to click came in May, when Matt made the trip to Whitby to meet Danielle Close and the Whitby Fire program. He pitched them on something special: the prospect of their girls joining the Phoenix for this event. They said yes. A contingent of Whitby Fire players came aboard, and Danielle didn’t just send her athletes. After an already long summer season of ball hockey, she volunteered her own time to travel down to Utica and join the Phoenix coaching staff.
Here’s the part that still doesn’t feel real when you say it out loud: most of this team met for the first time on Thursday night, at a single practice. The entire group didn’t stand together as one until Friday afternoon… a few hours before their opening game.
Friday: lessons and signs
The first opponent? Team PENN (the eventual tournament champions)
The Phoenix started a little rough, as any brand-new team would. But what showed up early was confidence. They created chance after chance, played without fear, and pushed the eventual winners to the edge before falling 1-0.
A few hours later came Team QC. Same belief, same wave of opportunities.. and the same frustration, as the ball just refused to find the back of the net. The scoreboard read 4-0, but it told a lie about the game that was actually played. Day one ended 0-2.
And yet, the signs were everywhere. The lines were starting to click. The power play was showing real improvement. And most importantly, a group of strangers was becoming a team. In the dressing room afterward, the players went around one by one, each offering honest thoughts on how all of us could be better. That’s not something you can recruit. That’s something a team decides to be.
Saturday: the switch
Saturday was full of firsts.
It opened against a very talented Team NJ, and the Phoenix quickly found themselves down 0-2. Two days earlier, that might have been the story. Not this time. The confidence didn’t waver… they were ready.
Then the first goal came. Then the second. Tied. And you could feel it: they belong here. Suddenly the switch flipped, and the team saw exactly what it was capable of. A third goal put them ahead 3-2. NJ answered with under a minute to go in the third, but on the very next shift, the Phoenix buried the winner.
The first win in program history. You couldn’t put the excitement into words. You just had to see it in their eyes.
A few hours later, against Team MASS, the bench felt different. These girls knew they were good now, knew what they were capable of, and it came out almost like a system… every shift working, fighting for every ball, holding the same relentless intensity from the first whistle to the last. That became the brand of this team: constant pressure, effort that never let up. In soccer they’d call it heavy-metal football. The Phoenix played a brilliant one and walked off with a 4-2 win.
That set up a crucial playoff game against Team New York (the last seed), and the only opponent the Phoenix had never faced across two years at Future Stars. Little tweaks here and there, nothing dramatic, because things were clicking. New York grabbed an early lead, but the Phoenix answered with a comeback to take it 2-1 and see the game out. Third seed secured. One step from Sunday.
Sunday: playing for a medal
This was it. Sunday at a major tournament… the Ontario Phoenix, a team that had met each other less than 48 hours earlier, standing across from programs that had practiced together week in and week out for months.
The semifinal drew a rematch with Team QC, the same team that had beaten them 4-0 on Friday. From where we sat as a coaching staff, this group still hadn’t fully grasped what they’d accomplished. They should have been bursting with pride. Instead, you could see they wanted more.
The Phoenix came to play. They took an early lead and kept pushing. But learning to play with a lead takes time, especially for a team still figuring each other out, and QC clawed back to tie it late. Overtime. An incredible extra period where the Phoenix had chances to end it and just couldn’t get it past the line of the crease.
Then a shootout… which took five shooters a side, a goalie showdown, McKenna standing tall and playing her game. The Phoenix came out on the wrong side of it.
But proud. Simply proud. Heads held high. What an insane performance, and what a distance travelled from where this whole thing started.
And now, all of a sudden… a medal was on the line.
The bronze
A rematch with Team MASS for a place on the podium.
It’s hard not to take a breath before a game like that and look back at the whole journey, the debut in 2025, the goal that never came, and everything the last 72 hours had unfolded. And now, here.
The game had everything the weekend had: highs, lows, emotion pouring out of every shift. Incredible goals. Incredible defensive stands. And a gut-check moment when MASS pushed back and forced overtime late. But the Phoenix were playing for a medal, and they were ready for it. The intensity rose.
Then came a five-minute power play, with a faceoff on the right side of the offensive zone.
All weekend, we coaches had said the same thing to each other about Sophia.. she’s a hustler, the kind of player who finds the spots around the net and forces the shot nobody sees coming. Eleven seconds into that power play, she found the back of the net.
And that was it. A medal, secured. The girls did it.
What it meant
The celebrations were pure emotion. But in that moment, it was impossible not to think about all the work behind the scenes… the hours upon hours Matt poured into recruiting for this weekend, for this exact moment. It all paid off.
It belonged to the girls who gave the Phoenix a chance back in 2025, too. And to the parents who travelled from every corner of our province for something this rare.
Because that’s what this is… rare. Girls in ball hockey, like in so many sports, have far too few opportunities to compete on a team like this. All I can say is this: spend a weekend like this one, with a group like this one (some girls who’ve been limited in their chance to show what they can do simply because of their gender) and you walk away wanting to do more. To be better at making room for them.
Couldn’t be prouder of this entire team. Ka-chow.
