Five-goal Fiddler-Schultz focused on team success

Riley Fiddler-Schultz played a tune not often heard around the Western Hockey League Sunday.

The Calgary Hitmen captain scored five times in his team’s 6-2 win over the Prince Albert Raiders at Scotiabank Saddledome, tying a team record and becoming just the fifth WHL player in the past ten years to tally five times in a single game.

Fiddler-Schultz joins Pavel Brendl as the only two Hitmen to accomplish the feat; ironically, Brendl’s five-goal night also came against the Raiders in December of 2000.

But Fiddler-Schultz, a former WHL Humanitarian of the Year in 2020, wasn’t thinking about setting records Sunday.

“That wasn’t in my head at all,” Fiddler-Schultz noted following the contest. “[We were] just trying to keep our habits good in the third, and not let off.”

“He was feeling it,” Calgary head coach Steve Hamilton commented. “But he’ll be the first one to tell you how good Zac Funk and Sean [Tschigerl] were around him.”

“I’m very grateful to be able to play with those guys,” Fiddler-Schultz said of his linemates.

“They’re great players, we work well together, we find each other in lots of spots,” he added.

For Fiddler-Schultz, Sunday’s game was perhaps an exclamation point on a WHL tenure in Calgary that has seen the Sherwood Park, Alta. product develop into one of the premier 20-year-old forwards in the WHL.

Originally selected in the seventh round of the 2017 WHL Draft, Fiddler-Schultz led the Hitmen in scoring a season ago with 69 points, and sits atop the Club scoring rankings this season with six goals and 10 points since returning from an NHL Training Camp with the Los Angeles Kings.

Still, the Calgary captain remains stoic, and focused on the task at hand: getting his team back to the WHL Playoffs, a journey that continues Friday night versus the defending WHL Champions in Edmonton.

“It’s nice for tonight,” Fiddler-Schultz noted Sunday, “but we’ll all reset and get ready for a big week of practice here.”

“We’re just going to keep building as the year goes on.”