The Elementary Schools of Whitehorse Invitational Floor Hockey Tournament has grown quite a bit from its humble beginnings, but its two main themes of healthy competition and good sportsmanship remain the same.

The annual competition was held for a 16th straight year on Friday and Saturday at several different elementary school venues.

"When I first came here and appointed as principal of Whitehorse Elementary, there was no sports teams at all of school against other school in any sport," said Pat

Berrel, co-organizer and founder of the tournament.

"I have always loved floor hockey, so that was the only sport that happened in '93 and there was six teams. The following year it grew to 10 and then 12 and then other sports started coming in because they could see it is a lot fun playing for their school."

A total of 24 teams were involved in this year's event, which included a separate category for boys and girls.

The girls competed on Friday at Whitehorse Elementary School, while the boys played games on both Friday and Saturday because of the extra pool in their division.

Pool B for the boys played at Holy Family Elementary School, while Pool A and Saturday's finals were held at Ecole Emilie Tremblay Elementary School.

Each pool for the boys was made up of eight teams.

Seven games were played in the round robin in the boys' category, while five were

played in the girls' division.

All round robin games consisted of one 10-minute period.

All teams qualified for the playoffs and the top team in each pool for the boy's category would play the eighth placed team in the first playoff game.

Playoff games were 15 minutes in length and medal games were increased to 20 minutes.

A felt puck was also used at the tournament, which ensured player safety, while not diminishing the quality of play.

Students in Grades 4 through 7 were allowed to participate at the event and each team had to have at least seven players, including a goalie.

Schools could have more than one team and this year even featured a school from Teslin.

Participants were competing for gold, silver and bronze medals and the winning boy's and girl's teams were also given a banner to go on display at their school.

Whitehorse Elementary stole the show at this year's event, winning both the boy's and girl's division in two very close games.

The boys' final consisted of Whitehorse Elementary going up against a very good team from Jack Hulland Elementary School.

Jack Hulland was coming off a thrilling 5-4 victory in its previous game against Takhini Elementary School after scoring the lone goal in a shootout, which qualified them for the final.

Jack Hulland got off to a great start in the contest, scoring the first two goals before the players on Whitehorse Elementary were able to get one of their own, cutting the deficit to 2-1.

After a goal was disallowed for Jack Hulland because of a crease violation, Whitehorse Elementary scored two more goals to take the lead.

Jack Hulland added one more, but that was as close as they would get in the 4-3 final.

With the victory, Whitehorse Elementary finished with a perfect 11-0 record at the competition.

Takhini Elementary finished with an impressive 4-1 victory over Christ the King Elementary School for the bronze medal game.

The girl's side featured two extremely close medal games won by a mere goal.

Whitehorse Elementary got the 1-0 victory over Takhini Elementary to claim gold, while Golden Horn Elementary School won by the same 1-0 score in the bronze medal final.

Ted Hupe is the principal of Holy Family and was also a co-organizer at this year's tournament.

He said floor hockey is one of those games that all kids can participate in.

"It is played in every school and this is really the only medium in which we can let kids who are good at it show off their skills," Hupe said.

"They get to play for their schools and connect with their schools.

It's a great place to practice sportsmanship and that's exactly why we do it."

Hupe said there are a lot of advantages to holding this tournament.

"We don't have trouble with kids who tend to be on our sports teams, with the wrestling team or floor hockey team," he said.

"Those kids are not a difficult problem because they all know if they become a problem at school they lose their eligibility to play on any teams.

So this is important for them."

He said having a variety of ages compete at the tournament is also important.

"It is a great leadership opportunity," Hupe said.

"That is a big part, then you got carry-over the next week in school with older kids playing with younger kids and fostering things at school."

Hupe said it's incredible to have this kind of healthy competition between elementary schools.

"What we find now is we have a lot of healthy competition happening and I think that was the biggest thing elementary schools had to wrestle with.

The idea of competition," he said.

"For years competition was not a good thing at the elementary level and now we have schools who are in healthy competition and healthy rivalries."

Austin Turner-Davis played for Whitehorse Elementary for the second year in a row at the floor hockey championship.

He said it felt great to win the tournament.

"Last year we came close, we lost by one goal in the gold medal game" Turner-Davis said.

"It feels awesome."

This was an outstanding tournament for Turner-Davis, who finished with 17 goals in total and scored all four in Saturday's final.

He said he was worried when the team fell behind 2-0.

"For the start of the game we didn't play that well," he said.

"We could have played a lot better and then after they scored two goals our coach just kind of got us to settle down.

I guess it worked."

Turner-Davis, 12, said the team had a strategy, which helped them get the win.

"One of our main strategies was we would have our goalie with a players stick, so that he could pass the puck up whenever he would get it instead of passing it to the corners," he said.

"That creates a lot more offense."

He credited a lot of the team's success to the play of their goalie, who allowed only four goals throughout the entire tournament.

"The last three were in the gold medal game and the first one was in our first game," Turner-Davis said.

"He didn't even do anything wrong he just couldn't see the puck and they got a shot through. Without good goaltending you can't really do much."

Turner-Davis, who has played ice hockey since he was four, said the gold medal victory is one of his highlights of the year.

"I have been waiting a while for this," he said.

"Even from the beginning of the year I had a feeling we would have a good shot at winning because I thought we had a really good team.