Humboldt tragedy hits home in Elmira
Sugar Kings board bus for Caledonia and think of fate, chance and life
WOOLWICH TOWNSHIP — The Elmira Sugar Kings boarded a bus on Wednesday afternoon.
A small-town junior team in green and gold. A playoff game awaiting an hour-plus down the highway. Happy hockey memories sure to be made.
Five days earlier, the Humboldt Broncos must have felt the same way.
“It’s hard not to think about,” said Kings veteran Ethan Skinner, a 20year-old from Kincardine who has endured “countless” hockey bus trips over his four years in Elmira.
“It’s something we do so often. We get on the bus a couple times a week. You just kind of take it for granted and never imagine something like that could happen.”
Last Friday, the unimaginable happened.
The green-and-gold Broncos met with tragedy when their team bus, en route to a playoff game in Nipawin, collided with a transport truck on a Saskatchewan highway, with 10 young players among the 16 dead.
Shockwaves of grief still emanate from the Prairies.
Flags are lowered across the country. Broncos colours are being displayed well beyond Saskatchewan.
Locally, Cambridge lit up its city hall sign in green and gold, too.
A few days ago, Canadians started placing candlelit hockey sticks outside their front doors, a symbolic offering for the souls who might need a stick for a heavenly game of shinny.
The sentiment soothes the wounded Canadian psyche — that for the crash’s innocent victims, somehow the games might continue in the great beyond.
“We had a couple come to the rink yesterday while we were on the ice at practice,” Skinner said on Wednesday afternoon before boarding the bus. “Someone who never even played hockey asked us for a spare stick that they can set outside their front door, just to pay tribute. It’s more than just the hockey community.”
Skinner and some teammates went out for breakfast on Wednesday morning. While driving to the restaurant, the stick tributes amazed them.
“A stick at every porch,” Skinner said.
Elmira understands sorrow. The Kings play at a rink, the Dan Snyder Memorial Arena, named in honour of a favourite hockey-playing son taken tragically in a traffic accident.
And Skinner, who played briefly in Merritt, B.C., last season, understands the scope of the impact of the Broncos tragedy. A few teammates from his former team in Merritt was a friend of
one of the Humboldt victims.
“I talked to a bunch of those guys from out west,” he said. “It hits them just as much as us, if not more. Because they knew someone.”
On Thursday, when Caledonia boards a bus and travels to Elmira for the second game in their series, kids wearing hockey jerseys get in free as the Kings, like so many hockey teams have done, honour the Broncos.
Proceeds from Thursday’s 50/50 draw will go to Humboldt GoFundMe campaign, which had topped $8.7 million on Wednesday.
The Kings will match the 50/50 donation, up to $1,500.
Mostly, the players and community will just be there for each other around the usually-jubilant occasion of playoff hockey.
Making sense of the senseless is too much to ask.
“For us, we’re kind of in charge of spreading the awareness,” said Skinner, who just finished his environmental science exams at the University of Waterloo.
“We’re kind of a main stage for people to be able to talk to. It’s a hard time. A lot of people don’t know how to deal with it. We’re just trying to be open and give people a chance to let out their sadness.”
Students at schools across Waterloo Region can let out some sadness on Thursday too. A national jersey day, to pay tribute to the Humboldt Broncos, is embraced by both school boards.
The Catholic board encourages students and staff to show their jersey day support for Humboldt by sharing photos on social media. “Maybe dressing up everybody in jerseys and taking pictures and sending them will help the healing process,” said chief managing officer John Shewchuk, who plans to wear his green-and-gold St. Jerome’s jersey from his high school playing days in the early ’80s.
“That’s sort of what we’re trying to do here.”
On Wednesday, Skinner and his Kings were simply trying to put any uneasiness aside in the wake of the Humboldt crash, as they boarded a bus bound for a game in Caledonia.
That was not so easy. “The saddest part about it is, it could happen to anyone,” Skinner said. “It kind of hits everyone pretty hard, whether you play hockey or not.”