The Okotoks Bisons will be in a tough spot when training camp hits later this year; the team will have a handful of 21-year-olds all battling for four spots on the team's roster.

With Hockey Canada and Hockey Alberta's rules on 21-year-olds and each organization only allowed to have four carded 21's on their roster, the Bison will have to cut a good few of their main roster from the 2019-2020 season.

Bisons General Manager Ryan Rarick says they will be losing some key players already due to players ageing out of eligibility.

"We'll be bringing back all of the players we can, we have three over-agers that obviously won't be able to come back in Jagger Thiessen, Kyle Harrison and Mitch Wolf, we also had ten 20-year-olds last year and six of them won't be able to play, so we do have some roster openings and have a lot of good young local talent that we are hoping fill those spots and it looks like they will."

Among those 20-year-olds are forward Tyson Scott and goaltender Devin Reagan, both of whom are on and off-ice leaders on the Bisons and will be battling among the rest for those four spots, Rarick says having those two back will be a key piece of the Bisons attempts at repeated success.

"They will be part of the group that can return, My initial talks with the ten who are eligible to return, eight are looking at coming back, of course, those decisions will be left to the coaching staff at the end of the day, I think Devin has been such an important piece to our team it would tough not to have him and then Tyson led the league in scoring so there is going to be difficult decisions for the staff for sure. It's tough to have those decisions but its good that we have so many of those good players who want to come back and play."

Rarick says they also have some perspective talent coming over from the remains of the Flyers roster in Layne Sniher and Liam Thiessen both of whom don't fall into that 21-year-old status. 

"The two we have spoken with and have verbal commitments with are Liam and Layne, Layne is a pretty special player, I know when the Flyers made the announcement we were among dozens and dozens of teams that contacted him so, for him to choose us it says a lot about the program we have, obviously you never know until the beginning of the season who you are going to have on the team but I do believe that those two players will be Bisons this season."

The Bisons will search for the same success as last season and Rarick says they'll do their best to get things going just like normal.