Bonner was ready for change

By GREGG DRINNAN
Daily News Sports Editor
Craig Bonner came to realize during last season that he wanted off the
coaching merry-go-round.
Oh, he enjoyed working the bench as an assistant coach with the WHL’s
Vancouver Giants. He still got a rush from the chess game that goes on back
there and he knows that he is going to miss it.
But the practices . . . well, that was a different story.
“It became clear to me when I wasn’t enjoying practice anymore,” the
Kamloops Blazers’ first-year general manager recounts. “I wasn’t getting
involved in making drills for practice, I just wasn’t getting excited about
that. The day-to-day practise and the video and that . . . that’s what made
it clear to me that I no longer had a desire to coach.”
And so Bonner, a former Kamloops defenceman, captain and assistant coach,
ended up signing a five-year deal as the Blazers’ general manager.
He couldn’t be happier.
“For me, it’s exciting,” he says. “The easy thing to do would have been to
stay in Vancouver, been the assistant GM, been the assistant coach and gone
about our business. When you’ve done it for so long, sometimes you take
things for granted and it comes easy.”
Instead, he chose to return to Kamloops and take on perhaps the biggest
challenge in major junior hockey — attempting to ressurect the city’s
once-proud franchise.
“For me,” Bonner says, “this is a very interesting challenge. We all know
what Kamloops is like as a market and what the expectations and the demands
of the job are. But it’s exciting for me and now that I’ve seen our coaching
staff and how well they’ve prepared and the detail and the work they’ve put
into training camp, I’m very confident . . .”
Bonner has been the GM here for five months now and says there really
haven’t been any surprises. There have been tough days — as the leader of
the new regime, he had to make some changes — but for the most part he says
things have been fine.
“It’s nothing I enjoyed,” Bonner said of having to fire people like interim
head coach Greg Hawgood and director of player personnel Gord Loiselle. “But
on the other hand if you’re going to be a general manager that is stuff you
have to be willing to do. I thought it was important to get people in that
not only I was comfortable with but (head coach Barry Smith) was comfortable
with.
“Whenever you have to tell somebody they’re fired, they have families, they
have kids, they have all that stuff . . . it’s not a fun part of the job.
It’s the same thing when you trade a player or release a player; you have to
be willing to do that in order to do this job.”
Aside from that, Bonner says, the job has been “probably what I thought it
would be.”
“I was fortunate in Vancouver that I was given the responsibility to
basically do all the stuff that I’m doing now,” explains Bonner, who also
was the Giants’ assistant GM. “There wasn’t a lot of new things that came
into play.”
The biggest thing, he says, was getting a coaching staff in place. He did
that by hiring head coach Barry Smith and then getting assistants Scott
Ferguson and Geoff Smith in place.
“It would have been nice to have a coaching staff in place a little earlier
in the summer,” Bonner allows, “but the guys worked hard and caught up so we
weren’t behind from Day 1. We were ready to go.”
The coaches put together a highly organized training camp, one that included
practice sessions, scrimmages and lots of instruction.
“I’m sure a lot of the veteran players found training camp very hard and
tiring,” Bonner says, “and it was that way for a reason. We have a lot of
work to do. If we want to be a competitive team . . . we need to get the
details in every aspect on and off the ice right to be competitive.”
Bonner also is adamant that the Blazers’ organization — every aspect of it —
will come together as one.
For those unfamiliar with the layout of the Blazers’ operation, the team’s
business office — and Bonner’s office — are upstairs at Interior Savings
Centre. The dressing room and coaches’ offices are downstairs. Bonner wants
to make sure the distance doesn’t become an abyss.
“Everyone is important,” he says. “I don’t want the division between the
upstairs office and the downstairs people. Naturally there is, just with the
different roles and different jobs, but I think it’s important that everyone
feels a part of it.”
All in all, though, the early returns have Bonner smiling more often than
not.
“It’s been a fun experience,” he says, summing up the first five months.
“For me, I find it’s a challenge, a new challenge, and it’s something
hopefully we can put our mark on here in a positive way.”
gdrinnan@kamloopsnews.ca