LIFE ON THE BUS FORGES BONDS & MEMORIES
Players forge bonds and treasured memories during hours on the road
When he played for the Humboldt Broncos, the shortest trip Austin Duzan took on the team bus was an hour and 20 minutes. Most were much longer.
“It becomes your home away from home, right?” said Duzan, who played for the Broncos from 2014 to 2016, starting as an 18-yearold. “Sometimes six hours on the bus before a game, then you play three hours, and then you’re back on the bus for six hours.”
Even then, Humboldt didn’t have it as bad as other teams in the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League.
“We were fortunate enough to play in the middle of the division. For people going from Estevan to Flin Flon, that’s a pretty good hike.”
The team bus is a special place for anyone who played junior hockey. It’s a place of close bonding and community for teenaged players who, in most cases, have left their hometowns and their families to chase their hockey dreams. Players ride the bus in junior leagues all over the world, but hockey on the Prairies takes it to an extreme. The distances are vast, the towns are tiny, and you’re driving in the dead of winter — frequently in whiteout conditions or with temperatures well below –30 C. It’s a rite of passage with particular resonance in Saskatchewan, home of the legendary Gordie Howe.
In the modern era, Saskatchewan produces more NHL players per capita than any other province, with its sparsely populated neighbour Manitoba as the only real competitor. This is hockey heartland by any definition. When Ryan Shields heard the Broncos team bus had suffered a horrific, deadly crash on Friday, it immediately brought him back 20 years to his days riding the bus with the Kindersley Klippers.
“All the stories we talk about these days are the crazy stuff that happened when we’re on the bus,” he said.
“I could tell you probably a dozen different bus stories from playing in Kindersley, and I would honestly struggle to tell you a dozen different in-game stories. As a junior hockey player, you’re on the bus more than you’re not, really. I was closer to any of those teammates of mine, from the amount of time I spent with them in a single season, than I was to my sisters.”
Duzan said this tragedy hits hockey players so hard in part because they’ve all been there.
“How many times have we been on that bus? How many times have we drove in conditions 10 times worse than that? There was times you couldn’t even see the front of the bus when you’re driving, but you got there safe, put your helmet on and played. You didn’t worry about that stuff because it wasn’t your job to worry about it.”
The bus has a sense of order to it. Senior players sit near the back, junior players near the front, coaches at the very front. Travelling to a game, players would often get on in sweat pants but change into suits before arriving at the arena.
“Going to a game, I usually had a nap,” Duzan said. “We also always had movies going on. Lots of guys would play cards. Lots of guys would talk about the game, or who they’re playing against or who they’re with, or sit with their linemates. Everyone had their own different ways for preparing for a game.”
As they approached the town, players would get into game mode. The Broncos bus crashed at a highway intersection about a half-hour from Nipawin, where Game 5 of their playoff series was set.
“I can just envision every one of those players,” Shields said. “They would have had their earphones in, and they would have been getting in a place in their minds ready to go to war for each other. They wouldn’t have been laughing, they wouldn’t be playing cards or anything. They’d be ready to get off the bus and go do what they were supposed to do.”
The bus ride home would be very different depending if you won or lost. Some trips would have you driving through the middle of the night after a game, getting back to your billet at 4 a.m.
Shields had moved to Kindersley as a 16-year-old in 1998 with the goal of a hockey scholarship to a U.S. college — and he succeeded, going on to play Division 1 NCAA hockey for Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.
He works today as a real estate agent in Brandon, Man., and spoke by phone from the arena in nearby Portage la Prairie, where his 10-year-old son was playing in a hockey tournament.
“All of my memories of the bus are just so good,” he said. “They’re just good memories of jokes, and of certain guys, and of stories, and guys falling out of bunk beds when we stop. Those memories that stick with you for the rest of your life.”
He said the story of a 2011 plane crash in Russia that killed an entire hockey team affected him, but not nearly as much as the Humboldt bus crash, which killed 15 people and injured 14 more.
“But this, this was me. This was me when I was younger.”
For Duzan, the connection is even closer. “There’s a guy I talked to four, five days ago about how their playoffs are going, their matchup against Nipawin. It’s hard to think about because I talked to a guy four days ago, and now he’s in a coma.”