The battle for the State Boys’ Hockey championship takes place this weekend in Brookings.

The Aberdeen Cougars are among eight teams vying for the title. The Cougars enter as the sixth seed and will play the Sioux Falls Flyers West at 9 a.m. Friday in the opening round. The two teams split during the regular season.

While Aberdeen coach Jeremey Backous said the team is excited to once again be in the state tournament, he noted it was a tough road just to get there.

“There was a lot of parity in the league this year and every game was important,” Backous said. “It was a battle every game to get to where we are.”

That journey included working to improve every day to have a shot at qualifying for the state tournament.

While the team had its struggles at times, Backous was glad to see the Cougars play better in the second half of the season and noted that wins over Sioux Falls West and East at the end of the regular season showed how that they could compete at a high level heading into the postseason.

“We had a really good team effort out of all four lines and to go down to Sioux Falls the last weekend of the regular season and beat both of them speaks a lot to how competitive the team is and just everybody doing their part,” Backous said.

The Cougars lost to Sioux Falls West at home in early January 6-4, before the late-season 5-4 win in February.

“Boy, they are a really good team,” Backous said of the Flyers. “They have really good overall team speed and just really skilled.”

Backous described how the team was able to come away with the win over Flyers and noted how it will take a similar performance to pull off another win on Friday.

“We were able to jump out early and get a couple goal lead on them,” Backous said. “(Sioux Falls) played really hard to the end, but we stood tall and we defended really well. Obviously, Colton (Townsend) played really well at net for us and that’s what it’s going to take. To beat a good team like that we’re going to have to be sound in all areas of the game and then pop some in early.”

When it comes to the tournament field, Backous says it is wide open field.

“It could be a you pick’em type of deal,” Backous said. “It’s tournament play, it’s a three-game season, every shift matters, and obviously, it’s nice to have some puck luck too, but anything can happen.”

With that being said, Backous said the Cougars will need to play full games and have players step up in order to bring home the championship.

“We’re going to have to play three really solid games defensively and then find some ways to score some goals,” Backous said. “Any given game we have somebody different stepping up, and that’s been our reason for success this year is just everybody’s contributions. It’s not even scoring goals; it’s covering guys defensively, blocking shots, doing the little things that it takes to win hockey games against good opponents.”