The Humboldt Broncos tragedy really hit close to home for a lot of Canadians.
I think we all feel like we knew the young players who died, and know the others still in hospital.
We feel like we know their families and home-away-from-home families – their billets.
We feel a familiarity to the team personnel; the dedicated coaches, trainer, equipment manager and young people whose job it was to report on the team’s exploits – a radio voice, a statistician.
We definitely know the excitement of early spring hockey playoffs and just how important a junior hockey team can be to their respective community. Just how integral.
I felt all of that as I watched coverage of the horrific bus accident in Saskatchewan Friday (April 6) evening, as the Broncos drove north to meet the Nipawin Hawks in Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League (SJHL) playoffs.
An accident which, as of April 11, claimed the lives of 16 people with 11 remaining in hospital; some in critical condition. A nightmare come true.
The idea of busing to hockey games is something a lot of people on social media were reflecting on as well, in the aftermath of the tragedy. I thought of my countless bus rides over the years which started as a 16-year-old junior player and continued right up until last year, as the head coach of the Antigonish Junior Bulldogs.
With just a few years off from competitive hockey, that’s almost 30 years of winter bus rides – some of the best moments of my hockey days but, mostly, blurred memories due to the repetition.
In the wake of the accident, that blur was lifted significantly for one year in particular -1995-96 - which I spent playing senior hockey in Saskatchewan; in a small town named Unity, a farming community close to the Alberta border.
As part of the appropriately named Wild Goose Hockey League (now called the Sask West Hockey League), we – the Miners - traveled in a small school bus which sufficed for numbers, as many of our players lived in different communities and would drive on their own to meet us for away games. It didn’t really suffice for the frigid Prairie temperatures, only extra layers did that.
We traveled up and down Highway 21 while playing in communities such as Biggar, Kerrobert, Kindersley and North Battleford; Unity, fortunately, being somewhat central to those other towns. Highway 21 is a north-south highway, very similar to Highway 35 where the Broncos’ accident took place.
All the highways I traveled on in Saskatchewan seemed so flat and straight I would always quip you could see the next community, its silos and maybe a water tower, while still five kilometers away. An exaggeration, of course, but it was my first thought as I saw images of the intersection where the tragedy happened.
How? Why?
Of course, more than the highways and rinks of Saskatchewan, I remember the people. My teammates, mostly SJHL alumni, and the kind, down-to-earth people of Unity. Generation after generation of good, hard-working people; farming, mining in some cases, and enjoying baseball in the summer and hockey in the winter. I picture the folks of Humboldt being of the same ilk and my heart breaks for them.
And for the communities from which the players and team personnel hailed; all coming together in Humboldt to be a great junior ‘A’ hockey team … to be Broncos.
