It's going to be a grind for the Okotoks Oilers heading into the 2016 portion of the AJHL season.

The team went through a pile of high's and low's during the first 37 games, but highlights include winning the season series with South Division rivals the Camrose Kodiaks 4-2 and a couple of strong efforts against the Brooks Bandits have the Oilers going into the 2nd half of the season with some confidence.

Oilers Head Coach and General Manager James Poole says the Oilers are hoping to come out with best possible chance of playoff success in their last 23 games.

"We we're going to do is just focus on what we're going to do as a team here and kind of set a goal in mind terms of points in what we want to achieve this season," he says. "That's something we'll do internally with the players when we sit down with them when they get back from the Christmas break, it's going to be a lot more aggressive than we've had in the first half of the season."

With 11 rookies on this year's roster Poole says the honeymoon period is over for those players that consider themselves rookies on the roster.

"They've played 35 plus games in Junior, now the rookie tag is gone and now the expectations have gone up, they've had a chance to go home and get refreshed over the Christmas break and now the expectations are going to be ramped up come the second half and we're going to set an aggressive goal here on how we want to finish the season and if we can do that, that means we'll be playing some good hockey come playoff time."

The Oilers have four 20 year olds on their roster all with skill and veteran presence on the young roster, when asked if he'd be busy on the January 10th Trade Deadline getting younger or adding key pieces to his team, Poole answered with this.

"We're tapped with only two possible moves and we can only stay at 23 players so now its just kicking tires and seeing what makes most sense for us as a hockey club so we're going to look at every option, getting younger or adding pieces and kind of what makes sense for us short term and long term."

The Oilers begin the second half of the AJHL season January 2nd at home when they battle the Canmore Eagles.