Practice Report: D'Amigo proud of USA World Juniors win

Memo to family and friends: be careful when Jerry D’Amigo’s watching a riveting sporting event on the television.

The forward gave his wife quite the scare Tuesday night as the United States grinded out a 2-0 victory over Canada in the gold medal game of the World Junior Championship, held this year at Edmonton’s Rogers Place.

“It was great to watch a game like that from start to finish,” D’Amigo said. “My wife was caught off-guard when I was jumping and yelling - even I was too, but games like that with USA versus Canada always get the blood flowing.”

D’Amigo had missed being able to watch the preliminary round games and the quarterfinal and semifinal matchups, but was determined not to miss the championship match.

D’Amigo, a two-time medalist with Team USA at the prestigious Under-20 tournament (gold in 2010 - pictured in the photograph above at the far left; bronze in 2011), was proud of the young men who were viewed by many pundits as underdogs heading into the tournament-deciding game against the Canadians.

The fact that the United States never laid claim to gold until first breaking through in 2004, and subsequently again in 2010, 2013, 2017 and once more in 2021, is not lost on D’Amigo.

“For them winning, it feels great to see the happiness and accomplishment of success because it’s such a hard tournament to win and it can go either way with so much talent in the tournament,” D’Amigo said. “Every year I want Team USA to win, but as you can see there hasn’t been too many [first-place finishes]; in the past 20 years that’s changed. I’m really happy for those guys and everyone involved like the coaches and trainers - I actually saw some of the same doctors and trainers who were there when I was playing in 2010.”

Following a busy week that saw the Solar Bears push their season-high winning streak to four games before suffering a pair of losses to Florida during the weekend, the Solar Bears got busy with a grueling practice on Tuesday that has helped set the tone for the rest of the week leading into Friday’s home rematch with the Everblades.

“Obviously those losses don’t sit well, and this week’s focus is on learning and gaining more confidence in the things we need to work on. Knowing we play Florida and Jacksonville a lot, we have to improve those things, or it’ll be the same result. We can’t change those previous results, but we can change the outcome of the next games.”