Scott Sandelin said at Thursday night’s press conference, “If you don’t have nerves, you’re probably not human.”
If you go by that qualification, Travis Oleksuk and Kyle Schmidt definitely are, as their jitters have made sleeping a bit difficult coming into the tournament. With the most important game of their careers coming up tomorrow night, both are hoping for some nice Z’s tonight.
“Starting two weeks ago, every game that I’ve been a part of has been the biggest game of my life,” said Schmidt. “Especially tomorrow night. It’s going to be huge.
“I think I hopefully got all the jitters out last night. I had a tough time falling asleep last night, so hopefully that’s out of the way and I’ll be able to fall asleep tonight, but I don’t know. Fortunately, we’re roommates [mentioning Oleksuk] so hopefully we can calm each other down and get some rest tonight.”
Oleksuk is hoping for some sleep as well and using the approach of routine to help.
“Hopefully I can get some sleep tonight, but you’ve just got to approach it as any other game,” he said. ”Obviously, it’s what we’ve played all year for. This is where we wanted to be, this is what we talked about at the start of the year, our end goal was to be here, so basically I’m going to try and get my sleep and just approach it as any other game.”
Their coach, who has perhaps seen them snooze on a number of bus trips, thinks they’ll be just fine.
“Knowing these guys, they’re not going to have any problems sleeping,” joked Scott Sandelin.
