The Foothills Storm is the newest addition to the Alberta Junior Female Hockey League.

President of the club, Darcy Williams, says after last season ended, five of the players' careers were effectively over and so it was decided they try to form a Junior A team in the local area.

"I like taking on challenges so I thought 'why not' and so I reached out to the league and then ended up speaking to the vice-president, Rob Nelson, and in speaking with him he laid out the groundwork and what I needed to do and the commitments that I had to be able to provide to the league in order for them to accept our application."

"It started with obtaining a number of committed players, the required ice so we would have home games in the area and then certain amounts of money to pay for certain deposits to show that we were serious."

He was able to come up with about ten players, enough to move forward and then he got word that a Calgary team had folded, leaving players looking for a place to play.

"To this day I say the stars aligned for us because that not only allowed me to go from having two to 12 committed players, that number shot up to over 20," 

Rob Nelson was an assistant coach with that team and after a meeting, he was chosen as the Storm's first-year coach.

"Just in dealing with him from a league standpoint I was really impressed with what he had to say and it just seemed natural to let him take the reins for this first year in the league because he's coached in the league as an assistant and head coach before and he's there for the players and wants them to succeed and develop."

He says not all players want to go on to play university or college hockey whether locally or even south of the border and by having this team as an option, it gives players a chance to stay in school or keep working and still play a competitive level of hockey.

The Storm will split its home games between the Oilfields Arena in Diamond Valley and the Blackie Arena.

"We have some practice ice that we're going to be using, mostly in Blackie but we're going to be reaching out to other arenas in the foothills area. We're hoping that this will be our inaugural year where we're going to be trying to get our foot in the door, try to establish ourselves and we're hoping in future years we can try and find one arena that will be our true home arena for both games and practices but being the new kid on the block we can't exactly be too picky, we're going to work with what we're given and we're very appreciative of both Blackie and Diamond Valley in giving us the ice that they did," he says.

Williams says anyone looking for more information on the team they can get in touch with them through email.

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