TOWN NEEDS BEST SAVE
Can an Alberta oil town prevent its junior hockey team from folding?
On cold nights in the 1950s, when organized hockey arrived in their neck of the Prairies, the people of Beaverlodge, Alta., would pile into the back of a borrowed grain truck and take the highway out of town. Sometimes, it was regular townsfolk who huddled by the vehicle’s wood stove, bound for the stands of an opposing rink. Other times it was the players themselves, sticks and skates in tow, warding off the tedium of winter.
These trips happened before Darryl Martin was born, but he has heard the stories.
Martin, 48, has become a standard-bearer for hockey in this community of 2,500 people, halfway west from Grande Prairie to the British Columbia border. He played as a child, grew up and coached his kids. For four years, he was a trainer for the Junior B Beaverlodge Blades, the top team in town. For the past two years, he was club president.
A lot has changed in the last few months, though. For one, Martin stepped down as president in March. And as of this winter, after 19 seasons in the North West Junior Hockey League, the Blades no longer exist.
“We’ve had some challenges up here,” Martin said.
The story of the Blades, of a proud, workmanlike team stumbling toward an untimely end, is one of struggle. They struggled on the ice for much of this decade, and never more so than in the final months of 2016, when injuries mounted and losses inevitably followed. They struggled financially, like a lot of businesses across the province, after the worldwide collapse in oil prices in 2014.
Until Dec. 11, they struggled with an existential choice: keep playing despite an onerous deficit and a 1-19-1 record, or bow out of the league midway through the season. That day, the NWJHL granted the Blades’ request to suspend operations, disbanding the club’s roster in one swoop.
But the struggle isn’t over. At the same meeting where Martin relinquished his volunteer role, six other people — some of them local business owners, some of them parents with junior-aged sons — stepped forward to form a new board of directors.
They are tasked with saving hockey in Beaverlodge. Against their run of fortune, they’re optimistic.
“They’re seizing this as an opportunity to reinvent the club a little bit, and to move forward and create some new traditions and behaviours,” Martin said.
“I’m looking forward to it. They want to be like a phoenix and rise from the ashes.”
In Beaverlodge and communities like it, Alberta’s economic downturn did not spare many industries. Oil and gas was the first to suffer. Service companies took a hit, as did anyone, really, reliant on a critical mass of consumers with disposable income. Somewhere in this chain is junior hockey.
At the end of 2015-16, their third straight last-place season in the NWJHL, the Blades were in a “significant deficit,” Martin said, “based on folks that were going to provide sponsorship that just weren’t able to. You’re sitting across the table from somebody who’s trying not to lose their business.” Funding local sports was no longer possible.
In May, a couple months after the season ended, Fort McMurray began to burn. Martin is the director of emergency disaster management for Alberta Health Services, and from “the second and third day of the fires until the middle of July,” his attention was far from Beaverlodge. Other members of the Blades board, busy with their own businesses, couldn’t provide the off-season planning work they typically would. The club’s financial straits went unresolved.
“It kind of cascades from there,” Martin said.
Beaverlodge took the ice in September alongside the NWJHL’s six other teams, including the threetime defending champion North Peace Navigators and the nearby Grande Prairie Kings. It became clear around Dec. 3 that they could not keep playing much longer; the Blades brought only 10 players to a game in Fort St. John, B.C., allowed 94 shots against the hometown Huskies and lost 21-2.
“I’d have teams sometimes where I had six injuries sitting in the stands — everything from concussions to broken bones,” said Martin, whose team subsisted long enough to play one more game, a 9-2 loss to the Sexsmith Vipers on Dec. 4. Within the week, the Blades applied for a leave of absence from the league. Their lone win and 20 losses were stricken from the record.
Martin said the players were disappointed, justifiably, but a lot of them understood. The NWJHL is “a working man’s league,” he said. It’s still junior hockey, but many Blades who aren’t in school are employed as labourers or tradespeople. Some of the older ones fit games and practices around fatherhood. They are used to difficult choices.
Ultimately, the Blades “couldn’t get enough money to get across the line for the season, and that’s really what held the team back,” said Ambrose Ralph, the president of the NWJHL.
“You can’t attract quality players without financial backing. Once you get that, you can attract some good players, and then the fans come. The fans don’t come before there’s a quality product on the ice, unfortunately. The loyal fans will come, but they won’t fill your arena.”
To Bill McKennan, the town’s chief administrative officer, Beaverlodge is more than just “oil and gas country.” Its agricultural research facilities are renowned around the world, he said. It is home to Canada’s national bee
diagnostic centre. Since 2004, a 1,500-pound beaver statue, perched on a log of equal weight, has greeted drivers approaching from the highway corridor.
The Beaverlodge Arena is a kilometre down the road.
“It’s Canada. What else do I need to say? The hockey gives people something to do in these communities, something to talk about, something to rally behind,” Ralph said, referring to towns in the NWJHL.
“It’s a reason to go out on a Saturday night when there’s nowhere else to go and it’s snowing, kind of ugly and cold. It’s really a central part of the community. And the roots run deep — there’s a lot of history there.”
Over the years, Beaverlodge has raised a small but eclectic crop of elite athletes. There’s 800-metre runner Simon Hoogewerf, a semifinalist at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, and curler Geoff Walker, lead for Brad Gushue’s Brier and world champion rink. Some of the senior-aged hockey players who once clambered into grain trucks, it is said, could have played in the Original Six NHL, had they seized the opportunity.
Three of their successors got there eventually.
The first, left-winger Jerry Holland, dressed in 37 games for the New York Rangers in the 1970s. In 1977-78, he had a stint closer to home with the World Hockey Association’s Edmonton Oilers — one season before Wayne Gretzky arrived. By that time, Holland was playing out the string of his career on the Spokane Flyers, a member club of the short-lived Pacific Hockey League.
In 1994, the Los Angeles Kings used a fifth-round draft pick on Chris Schmidt, a big centre of German descent. Schmidt played 10 games for the Kings in 2002-03, but made his bones in the North American minors and in his ancestral country. Shortly before he called it quits, Schmidt suited up for Germany in two world championships and the 2010 Olympics.
The most accomplished of the bunch is Matt Walker, who logged 314 games on four NHL bluelines before retiring in 2012.
Walker spent the bulk of his childhood outdoors; he played baseball in summer, visited his family’s cabin every weekend and all but lived on an uncle’s farm, dirt biking, fishing and “trampling through the trees.” He was raised a few blocks away from an outdoor rink, Art Walker Memorial. At age six, he made his hockey debut on the Beaverlodge Hot Dogs.
“Being up north, you have long winters, so hockey, it was life growing up there,” Walker said. “If you weren’t on the ice, you’re in the street playing hockey, and if you weren’t there, you’re in the basement. It’s all you ever thought about doing.”
Another product of Beaverlodge’s hockey system is Devon Moulds, 20, a welder off the ice and an enforcer on it. Two older Moulds brothers, Cody and Dylan, captained and starred for the Blades earlier this decade. Devon was a Blade until Dec. 11, and a fixture on the local beer league circuit ever since.
The Blades lost a lot of games with Devon on the roster. When he thinks back a couple years, though, he remembers a favourite win in detail. On a Saturday night in November 2014, Beaverlodge took its 0-13-1 record to Fort St. John. They won 3-0, then watched as the Huskies stayed on the ice and skated lines.
Overall, Devon cherished the chance to represent his hometown. He said he would love to come back for one more season.
“It’s where I started, where I would like to finish,” he said.
Before the NWJHL breaks for the summer, there is one important date left on the schedule: April 22. It is when the Blades’ fate will be decided.
To hear the old club president tell it, junior hockey in Beaverlodge still has a lot of potential, warts and all. In a smaller town, it can be easier for the junior team to book practice time, Martin said. For players who live even further north, in Yukon or the Northwest Territories, the NWJHL can offer roster spots that don’t exist at home. And for all the games they’ve lost, the Blades have at least been adept at building character.
“You’d like to have that opportunity for anybody to be as good as they can be,” Martin said.