Broncos coach honoured in Vegas
‘LUCKY MAN’: LATE HUMBOLDT COACH WARMLY REMEMBERED BY HIS WIFE AT NHL AWARDS GALA
Darcy and Christina Haugan had their plans made, plane tickets and hotel booked. This was their annual week in Las Vegas, at a place off the strip, where Darcy worked at a hockey camp and Christina soaked up the atmosphere of a place far removed from their day-to-day reality.
“It was a free trip for the two of us, kind of our week away,” Christina said Wednesday, in the hours before Darcy was named the posthumous winner of the NHL’s Willie O’Ree Community Hero Award. “The first couple of years we were here, it was very surreal. I made him walk so much (one week) that he literally walked a hole in his flip-flops.”
After tragedy struck — after the collision between bus and semi, after 16 travelling members of the Humboldt Broncos, including coach Darcy, died — Christina cancelled the trip.
But here she is, in Vegas again, the very same week she was supposed to walk that hot pavement with her husband. Instead, she’s watching the hockey world honour him and the team he loved to coach.
There’s an old family tale of Haugan at four years old, confiding in his grandmother. “Grandma, I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said. “I just can’t stop thinking about hockey.” And the love blossomed. “It’s a great day to be a Bronco, gentlemen,” he’d say, both when his players hit the ice, and at the close of his game-day speeches. Crash survivor Bryce Fiske has those words on a tattoo. Teammate Tyler Smith said he just might do that, too.
“It summed him up so much,” Christina said. “He was so proud to be a coach, and he wanted them to be equally proud to be a player. He’d always tell them, ‘You guys are so lucky to be able to do this. You guys are playing hockey full time, essentially — cherish every moment of this, because it won’t last forever.’ ”
Those players still talk fondly of a snow day, back in February, when one of those colossal Saskatchewan dumps buried Humboldt in a big, white blanket. The Broncos showed up for practice, and Haugan told them to forget about pulling on their gear. “No practice, boys,” he said. “Go shovel snow.”
And boy, did they shovel. “First, they did pathways to the arena for the rink staff,” Christina says. “Then he sent them home to do their billets. Then they put a tweet out, and we had calls coming in — it was crazy. They cancelled practice that day, to go shovel snow.” The community served the Broncos, Haugan told his players, and now it was time to serve the community. The memory makes Broncos’ survivor Kaleb Dahlgren smile broadly. “Driveways, restaurants, walkways, we pulled people out who were stuck on the street, shovelled out vehicles and cleared snow for other businesses,” he said. “And it was really good. Christina met Darcy at Briercrest Bible College, where they both studied after high school. They were married 17 years, and had two kids — 13-year-old Carson, and nine-year-old Jackson. They worked side-by-side with the Broncos, because after Darcy took the job in 2015, she became the team’s office manager.
“I also cook, and sew name-bars on jerseys, and sharpen skates,” she says.
On April 6, Darcy came into the office she shared with assistant coach Mark Cross, and said the players had to eat more; they needed additional calories after their triple-overtime playoff loss to the Nipawin Hawks.
He gave Christina a sideways glance, and she knew what that meant: Please rustle up 30 spaghetti dinners for the bus ride that day to Nipawin. It was 11:30 a.m., and the bus would leave at 2:30. Usually, she had a day’s notice. As she bustled about, she sent him a text, sharing her stress. “And I said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, it’s a game day. I shouldn’t be texting you this and stressing you out.’ He said, ‘You guys are always more important to me than a game-day.’ It was a playoff game-day. Potentially, it could have ended the series that day. But we were always more important to him,” she says. Later that day, the bus crashed, and Haugan — a man of prayer and deep faith — was gone. So were players, coaches, and a few days later, the trainer. Haugan left a legacy that’s prompted widespread praise from those who knew him. He helped players through depression and addictions; his office was always open to them. He saw himself building men first, and hockey players second, and his players spent lots of time in the community, making things better. “When he was younger, (hockey) was probably just about the fun and the game and the teammates, and that sort of thing,” she said.
“But as he got older, I think he realized you can have such an impact on people and communities and kids, and everything. When they would go into the schools, the kids just look up to these hockey players, idolize them. They think they’re the greatest. To be able to have impact, but to be able to use it for good ... you could just as easily have a negative impact on the community and the kids. I think being able to use hockey as a tool to impact people, he always just thought he was the most blessed and lucky man to be able to do hockey as a full-time deal.”
NAMED POSTHUMOUS WINNER OF WILLIE O’REE COMMUNITY HERO AWARD.