The Sunshine Coast has finally arrived. We are to have our own hockey team! Technically Gibsons will have it, but I am sure Gibsonians won’t mind the rest of us sharing the glory, especially if we buy a few season tickets.
Just think! Finally we can stand straight and proud beside places like Okotoks, Gimli and Nipissing and claim a place on the hockey map of Canada! Of course we have had hockey teams for years but just the kid stuff. And the geezers.
We are talking serious, big-time hockey here. Or at least big-er time. This new team will not be playing the Vancouver Canucks. That’s major league hockey. Those teams travel on jet planes. Understanding all the gradations between the different levels of hockey leagues can be a bit crazy-making but I detect widespread confusion about just where the new team fits into the hockey universe and will dedicate this column to de-mystifying the situation. To readers who were hoping for another session on flower arranging, my apologies.
The main division in hockey is between those that travel by plane—the NHL—and those that travel by bus, which are the minor leagues. Not to be confused with minor hockey, which is what our kids have been playing all these years, and where travel is by minivan. The main way to tell the difference between minor league hockey and just minor hockey is you don’t have to pay to watch the latter. If you paid admission, you’re experiencing the major kind of minor.
So our shiny new team will be in the minor leagues. But not the minor leagues of the Abbotsford Canucks—because that’s pro hockey. Those players get paid. The minor leagues are divided into minor pro and junior. Minor pro hockey is made up of leagues like the American Hockey League (AHL), which the Abbotsford Canucks belong to, along with the East Coast Hockey League (ECHL) and, if you can believe it, the Dixie- based Southern Professional Hockey League, (SPHL), home to the Louisiana IceGators and Roanoke Rail Yard Dawgs.
The non-pro sector, junior hockey, is generally classified as amateur although the players do get paid, just not very much (if you don’t count the occasional multi-million signing bonus). Also there is an age limit. If the players have whiskers, it is probably not junior hockey. Junior is basically for players between 16 and 20, although there are exceptions for underage and overage players. To be underage you have to be very good, like the two Con(n)ors McDavid and Bedard, who were allowed to play junior at 15. Not sure what qualifies a guy to play over age, maybe being handy at fixing flats on the bus.
I know you’ve already heard more on this topic than you ever wanted to know, but we’re not done yet. I’m sure some are thinking, well, maybe we won’t be watching the fledgling Gibsons Grampuses play the Canucks and Oilers, but if they play the Kamloops Blazers and Vancouver Giants, that would be pretty good. Those teams occasionally make it onto TV. Sorry, no. Those guys are in the WHL, which is a junior league right enough—but a major junior league. Our hopeful Gibsons Geargrinders will be in a Tier2 Junior A league, which is several notches below Major Junior—but still better than those poor saps in Junior B.
Our new heroes will be in a league called the Pacific Junior Hockey League (PJHL) and the visiting teams we will be seeing will be the Langley Trappers, Delta Ice Hawks and Richmond Sockeyes. Safe to say nobody reading this has ever heard of these teams or the PJHL, but it is a legit 15-team league based in the Lower Mainland that has been determinedly icing teams since 1965. It is not quite as glamorous as BC’s other Junior A League, the tier 1 BC Junior Hockey League (BCJHL), home of the Powell River Paper Kings, but the PJHL has graduated a few solid NHL players like Brent Seabrook and Devon Toews. Say what you want, the new Howe Sounders will give us a window on some competitive hockey of a calibre not previously seen on these shores. Having your own hometown team to cheer for can be great entertainment and will cost less than parking your car at a Canucks game. More important, the new team will give good local talent a way to keep going after they age out of minor hockey. I can only wish the brave organizers the best of luck, which they will need since these tier II junior clubs have the life expectancy of sand fleas.
And as to the actual name of the team? A Coast-wide naming contest just finished up, after which the owners will duly christen it whatever they were going to in the first place. Let us hope they avoid the hoary old sports cliches like Lions, Tigers, Grizzlies, Panthers, etc. If a team must honour charismatic megafauna, at least it should pick something unique to the region—like the Giant Pacific Octopus or the Jumbo Spot Prawn.
No announcement was made by press time, but seriously, can this team be called anything but the Gibsons Beachcombers?
Editor's note: This column was written and published in Coast Life before the team's name was revealed at the beginning of December.
