Goaltending Carries Academy 16U Teams in 2025-26
WENATCHEE, Wash. – In a season impacted from start to finish with injuries, outstanding goaltending was a constant for the Wenatchee Wild Hockey Academy’s 16-and-Under team in 2025-26.
The Wild Hockey Academy won eight games this past season, but finished the year on a high note at the Canadian Sport School Hockey League’s Western Championships, routing North Shore Academy 7-1 behind a hat trick from Mason Richardson and six power play goals. Mikai Mast closed out his season with a 33-save performance to anchor Wenatchee’s back end.
Despite allowing a goals-against average of 4.55, Mast wrapped up the season with a .916 save percentage and earned six of Wenatchee’s eight wins. Bannen Clements posted a save percentage of .893 in his own right.
“Our goaltending has been outstanding,” said Wenatchee 16U head coach Pat Norlin. “If you look at our record and you look at our goaltenders’ stats, playing on the number-one team, you don’t face the high-danger chances that you face on the Wenatchee Wild Hockey Academy. To have the numbers they have is very impressive – they’ve kept us in a lot of games. If we could have scored a little bit more, it would have equaled a lot more wins.”
After battling to find the win column in September and October, the 16s charged out of the CCM World Invite in Chicago with three wins and a tie on the weekend, and jolted the Seattle Jr. Kraken with a 3-2 overtime win on the opening day of the best-of-three Washington state playoff before ultimately falling a win short of a state title and a spot in the USA Hockey Pacific District tournament. A pair of wins at the Wenatchee Cup followed, as did a league win over Shawnigan Lake on the final weekend of the CSSHL regular season.
“I think we have more mature, more resilient, grittier, wiser individuals than we had in late August, when they reported,” said Norlin. “Like anybody, we’ve had our ups and downs this year – what’s plagued us and limited us where we could have had seven or eight more wins was, we struggled to score goals all year. We had two or three forwards get in a [U18] game, and a number of our defensemen played multiple games, and all season we had 14U and 15O players practicing with us.”
Despite battling at times to fill the lineup card, Wenatchee did have four players who appeared in every game, as well as five others who missed only one or two games on the final 49-game schedule. Keagan Nussbaum led all scorers with 39 points, including 27 goals.
