Changes? Leclerc has seen a few

By GREGG DRINNAN
Daily News Sports Editor
Goaltender Justin Leclerc is in his fifth season in the WHL.
He has played with two teams, the Lethbridge Hurricanes and Kamloops Blazers.
General managers? He has known a few.
Head coaches? Yes, he has known a few of them, too.
Goaltender coaches? Ditto.
“As a goalie, it’s probably a little bit different because you don’t have to adjust to systems or anything,” says Leclerc, who will lead the Blazers against the visiting Red Deer Rebels tonight at Interior Savings Centre. Game time is 7 o’clock. “It is interesting to see changes come and go. You see a lot of the same things, though.
“But it’s up to the players to get things back on track.”
The 20-year-old Saskatoon native was selected by Lethbridge with the 46th pick in the 2004 bantam draft. He made the Hurricanes’ roster out of training camp in 2005 and fell right into a team in turmoil.
During his two seasons in Lethbridge, he played under three general managers (Darren Stocker, Brad McEwen and Roy Stasiuk), three head coaches (Lindsay Hofford, Luc Theoret and Michael Dyck) and one goaltending coach (Jeff Battah). Granted, McEwen and Theoret were in interim positions, but still . . .
During training camp in 2007, Leclerc was traded to the Kamloops Blazers.
Guess what? Yes, he found himself with Team Turmoil one more time.
Shortly before he arrived here, the Blazers were sold to majority owner Tom Gaglardi and NHL players Shane Doan, Jarome Iginla, Mark Recchi and Darryl Sydor. Six weeks into the season, they fired Dean Clark, the general manager and head coach, who had traded for Leclerc.
Brian Fortin took over as GM on an interim basis, and the team later signed Craig Bonner to a five-year deal.
Greg Hawgood took over from Clark as head coach, but was replaced by Barry Smith over the summer of 2008. Smith, in turn, was fired on Oct. 26 and Scott Ferguson now is the interim head coach, the Blazers’ fourth head coach in less than two years.
When Clark was dropped, goaltender coach Larry Robinson also got his walking papers. The Blazers later hired Steve Passmore, who stepped aside prior to this season and has been replaced by Dan DePalma.
Add them up and Leclerc’s resume includes six general managers, seven head coaches and four goaltending coaches. And we won’t even start counting assistant coaches.
Yes, Leclerc has had a ringside seat at a circus . . . or two.
Leclerc has been through enough regime changes that you might think he has heard just about everything. But it is his experience that the new message is pretty much the same as the last one.
“Oh, yes. It’s the same,” he says. “The only thing that changes from coach to coach is how they deliver the message.”
The message, he says, is about “building a culture that promotes all the messages like working hard, discipline, execution.”
As an experienced observer in such situations, however, he can’t explain know why players buy into some coaches’ programs and not others.
“That is something I haven’t figured out quite yet,” he states. “I’ve seen a lot of coaches but at the same time I haven’t been part of a really successful hockey club. I’ve seen a lot of the same things. I don’t expect it would be too much different if I was on a winning team.
“I think you just have to have the right chemistry and the players have to buy in. The players are the ones who have to do it.”
Leclerc is adamant about that last sentence. He says that no matter what happens the onus is on the players to get it together and produce.
“Sometimes change is for the better but at the end of the day it’s the players who play the game,” he says. “As long as there is structure the players have to go out and execute.”
Leclerc, whose Blazers are looking for a third straight victory tonight, hasn’t developed his spidey senses to where he can forecast change.
Asked if he can sense change coming, he replied: “To be honest, no.”
In fact, he said, the latest change, the firing of Smith, caught him by surprise.
“But once it happened, looking back, it shouldn’t have been a huge surprise,” he says. “We had to change something. We weren’t headed in the right direction.
“Even after the change, we didn’t turn it around right away. It took a little bit of work to get out of it. Now things look like they’re headed on the right path but there’s a long ways to go. We’re not out of the woods yet.”
gdrinnan@kamloopsnews.ca
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