Tribute to fallen teammate
Don Mills Flyers have emotional return to the ice after murder of Roy Pejcinovski, family
No one won and no one lost in a local minor hockey team’s first game back on the ice since the death of its star goalie.
Four days ago, Roy Pejcinovski, 15, was murdered in a wrenching triple homicide in Ajax, killed alongside his mother, Krassimira, and little sister, Venallia.
Cory Fenn, 29, has been charged with three counts of second degree murder.
When boys of the Don Mills Flyers bantam AAA team left the change rooms and stepped onto the ice at Canlan Ice Sports centre in Etobicoke Sunday afternoon, they did so to absolute silence. That quiet slowly broke into applause from onlookers. Then, after a brief warm up, the two teams — the Flyers and the Toronto Marlboros — lined up facing each other at centre ice. The boys on both sides removed their helmets. Some tilted their heads down. Others looked ahead, toward the other team.
“It’s difficult to know what to say,” Greater Toronto Hockey League president Don West said to the boys, and those watching. Rink 3 had been cordoned off for family and players only. At the entrance, a sign denoted the space as a private event, with a few photographs of Roy in uniform.
Pejcinovski had been in the Flyers’ system since age 7, team manager Nick Slawson told the Star this week. He called the boy “unlimited.”
Pejcinovski was a promising prospect in next year’s OHL draft. “We remember him as a teammate and friend,” West said, urging the boys to “sit together, support each other, and keep playing the game.”
And they did, but with a twist. The two teams tossed their sticks into pile at centre ice — with no discernible divide between Flyers and Marlboros. Players picked sticks at random, shuffling them like a deck of cards into two new teams.
They then peeled their rival jerseys and put on new ones, black or white with a capital “R,” for Roy, in burgundy. The colours in the boys’ socks — orange and black for the Flyers, blue and white for the Marlboros — were the only way to tell the teams apart.
The game would not count officially, so the scoreboard was set to Pejcinovski’s jersey number: 74.
“Just last week, these guys were pounding each other through the boards, and today they’re bonding together like a bunch of brothers,” Phil Zullo, who works in the GTHL in strength, conditioning and injury rehabilitation, said in the stands.
Whenever he watched the Flyers play, he said he watched from behind Pejcinovski’s net. “Kid’s good. He’s fast,” Zullo noted, slipping into the presenttense. There’s no wonder the team won nearly all its games, he said.
Zullo said it was a good idea to play an exhibition, rather than the scheduled league game Sunday.
“For them to go on and play another game, how do you enjoy it? ... This is therapy for them. Them just getting together, and just having a friendly like this.”
The team now faces the question of how to move forward. Before Pejcinovski’s death, they had reached the city finals to compete for the chance to represent the Greater Toronto Area for the provincial championship.
The team had already cancelled its game on Friday.
“I mean, this is devastating for the kids,” Zullo said. “They lost their goalie. And just the way everything happened, it’s not easy to go on,” he said.
“Hopefully they can get the courage up to go on and finish the final.”
Sunday’s game was a gentle way for the team to get back to normal, Zullo said. “Nobody objected to doing this. No one would even think twice about doing this.”
And indeed, in the hour before the game, goofy smiles creased the faces of players from both sides, who taped their sticks, leaned on the boards, and exchanged handshakes in their crisp suits and ties.
The boys wear suits to every game, a GTHL spokesperson co-ordinating media at the rink told the Star — training for the bigger leagues.
Right up until the game began, a pair of goalie pads — scuffed, white with flashes of orange — sat alone against the edge of the rink. Young goalies from multiple teams came to watch the Sunday afternoon game and show their support.
The team is slated to play their first competitive game after Pejcinovski’s death on Tuesday.
“It’s up to the Don Mills Flyers and the players,” Zullo said of the path forward. “I mean, they’ve got a funeral to deal with still. It’s not easy. They’ve gotta go to bed tonight knowing that this happened. It’s not going to leave their heads soon,” he said.
As the game ended, with no score officially recorded for either team, the boys came together for a group photograph. Smartphone cameras clicked and flashed. Then the ice cleared, and the rink reset for a new game.