Raiders captain Justice Christensen was also captain for Team Canada at the U20 World Ball Hockey Championships last weekend in Slovakia. (Prince Albert Raiders/Logan Boss)

By Nick Nielsen

Raiders captain and captain canada

Christensen speaks on World Ball Hockey Championships

Jul 9, 2025 | 3:46 PM

Prince Albert Raiders captain Justice Christensen is back on Canadian soil, and he’s brought some extra hardware home with him from Slovakia in the form of a gold medal from World Ball Hockey Championships.

Thinking back to how his ball hockey journey started, he played with a competitive team last year that had the right scouts watching to land him a spot on Team Canada, to now returning home as a world champion, a tournament best defenceman, and as Canada’s captain, it’s all a bit surreal.

“It was pretty crazy. I mean, the whole thing, going to Europe to play for Team Canada and to play ball hockey, I really wasn’t sure what to expect. But after meeting the guys, they were all great and then going through the whole process and then getting home with the gold medals, it was pretty exciting.”

You can read about Christensen and Team Canada’s full story from the tournament by clicking here, but the biggest story from the tournament was the rivalry that formed between Canada and Team Czechia along the way. The two teams played each other twice, once to start the tournament, and again in the final, and both games went to overtime.

Even between the games, Christensen said that you could feel a sense they would run into the Czechs again in the final.

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“Us, the U.S., and the Czechs were definitely the biggest kind of rivalry, but playing the Czechs twice, that second game we knew a little bit more about them. You could definitely feel the intensity going into it.”

Christensen put up eight points in the tournament to help him towards a Best Defenceman award at the tournament, and one of those points happened to come from Christensen’s signature onetimer slapshot. Between ice and ball hockey, Christensen believes that slapshot may even be more dangerous when it’s fired on the ball hockey rink.

“I would say (I shoot) harder (in ball hockey), just cause the ball actually curves, and especially with the one timer. It’s never really in the perfect spot, so you just try your best and actually from what I seen on that goal, it looked like it was going wide and then it curved almost into the net and I think that’s kind of what’s fooled the goalie.”

In the final play, Christensen had the first assist on the game winning goal that came just seven seconds into overtime. While it happened so quick and looked like set play, Christensen said it wasn’t, but good coaching strategies helped make it possible.

“It wasn’t a set play. That was something we talked about right from like the round robin games, that we wanted to transition quick and things like that, but not really a set play. That play just kind of opened up and yeah, it worked out.”

There wasn’t much time to celebrate in Poprad, Slovakia, as Christensen and his team were already loaded on a bus to Vienna, Austria by 2 a.m. Four hours later he was already on a plane back home.

Now back in Canada, Christensen hasn’t fully recovered from the jet lag of being over in Europe, but he’s already back in the gym preparing for camp with the Raiders coming up at the end of August.