The Micker and the Grizzlies

It was Jim Bouton, in his well-thumbed and eye-popping book Ball Four, who noted: “You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”
Troy Mick will tell you that it’s the same deal with hockey.
Mick is wrapping up his first season as co-owner, general manager and head coach of the KIJHL’s Revelstoke Grizzlies, who will be one of six teams here later this week for the Keystone Cup, aka the Western Canadian junior B championship.
The Grizzlies and Kamloops Storm open proceedings Thursday, 9 a.m., at McArthur Island Sport and Event Centre. For the first time in his coaching career, Mick will put in a 4:15 a.m. wakeup call to his players.
Mick, of course, used to hang his hat in these parts. He was the head coach of the WHL’s Kamloops Blazers in 2002-03; however, he barely made it through the regular season before health issues forced him to step aside.
At that time, he didn’t know if he would ever again see the inside of a dressing room. Sheesh, he even packed up his family and the in-laws and, like something out of a Jimmy Buffett song, moved to Margaritaville, er, Mexico for a year, where he worked in the real-estate game.
Immensely popular in his adopted hometown of Vernon, where he was on the junior A Vipers’ coaching staff when they won national titles in 1996 and 1999, Mick also has done stints as an assistant coach with the Portland Winterhawks, for whom he starred as a player, and as the assistant GM/head coach of the Tri-City Americans.
After Kamloops, he worked to regain his health, then returned to hockey as the Vipers’ general manager. That lasted two seasons before he chose to try Mexico.
Upon his return, he wasn’t certain that he wanted to get back into the game. And then Logan, one of his and Roxanne’s two children, gave him a recruiting spiel that went something like this: “You’ve coached everyone else, but you’ve never coached me.”
Which is how Mick ended up helping coach a peewee Tier 3 team in Vernon last winter. And then, when Logan got promoted to Tier 1, well, Dad went along, too.
“I had never coached minor hockey before and I had a blast coaching 12- and 13-year-olds,” Mick says. “It put some spark back into my heart.”
That led Mick to prepare and send out his resume. He got his first response within 48 hours and it wasn’t long before he had signed a five-year contract as head coach of the major midget SoCal Titans in the Simi Valley area of California.
However, there were visa issues and, as he so quaintly puts it, “I got booted out.”
Before he came home, though, he was able to help the WHL run its annual spring camp in Anaheim, which allowed him to make even more contacts in that area of the hockey world. Later, he would take in the training camp of the USHL’s Tri-City Storm, whose head coach is former WHLer Drew Schoneck.
The result is that the Grizzlies’ roster includes five Californians, including 19-year-old Faiz Khan, their leading scorer and the KIJHL’s most sportsmanlike player. From Santa Clarita, he had 68 points and eight penalty minutes in 41 regular-season games and was the MVP of the provincial championship tournament in Parksville.
No one in junior hockey understands better than Mick that, at the end of the day, it’s all about entertainment. Which is why he says the Grizzlies are “a fast, skilled, attacking team. . . . The top two things I look for in a player are speed and skill.”
Anyone who has watched Mick-coached teams is aware that defence isn’t Job 1.
“I like to create excitement,” he says. “If I win a game 5-3 I’m happy, where a lot of coaches may cringe because it’s not 2-1. We attack and then attack some more . . .”
Caleb Roy, the KIJHL’s top defenceman, makes things tick on the back end and on the power play. He’s a 20-year-old from Cranbrook who put up 60 points in 48 regular-season games.
Revelstoke is represented on the roster by forward Dayton Martens, 18, who had six goals and 252 penalty minutes in 44 games.
“We’ve got 60 kids in our minor hockey association so there’s not going to be a whole lot of local kids to fill up our team,” Mick says. “We’re going to have to find six or seven imports every year to fill our roster.”
There also is one Kamloopsian — defenceman Ben Bula, 18, who was acquired from the Castlegar Rebels in one of Mick’s few in-season roster moves.
“I’ve never been a guy who has traded a lot,” he explains. “I’ve been about development. I think I only made four moves all year, and some of them were for off-ice issues . . . guys going against our team rules and policies.”
The Grizzlies’ ownership situation is split four ways — Mick, Lou Hendrickson and Mike Roberts each own 25 per cent, as does the father-son pair of Joe and Andrew Kozek. Andrew, a second-round pick by the Atlanta Thrashers in the 2005 NHL draft, is with the AHL’s Chicago Wolves.
Mick, who controls the hockey operation, says he got involved because “I want to run a program the way I feel it should be run.”
That means there is a nightly curfew. It also means the Grizzlies are out in the community on a regular basis.
“We practise every day. We’re in the gym every day,” Mick adds. “A lot of junior B programs . . . they practise twice a week and don’t really have set workout programs. That’s a big reason why we are where we are today.”
Mick figures the trip to Parksville cost the Grizzlies as much as $6,000. And, although the KIJHL has given the organization a couple of grand, which might cover a night in a hotel and a team meal, the Keystone Cup appearance will cost them a chunk of change, too.
But these Grizzlies are immensely popular in Revelstoke.
Before going to Parksville, Mick says, a pep rally was held. A local radio station, Revelstoke EZ Rock, got involved. There were public skates with the Grizzlies and other community events. Businesses helped out by donating fuel or paying for meals. In about 72 hours, more than $8,500 was raised.
“It was amazing,” he says. “And then we ended up winning. It was a surreal situation.”
The Grizzlies returned to earth in a hurry as, on their way home, their bus was pulled over near Hope by a commercial vehicle inspector. It seems he had noticed the bus swaying.
“The front-end suspension is done,” Mick says.
It would seem that the Grizzlies will be using the Sicamous Eagles’ bus to get to Kamloops tomorrow.
As Mick says, “It’s been an interesting little while.”
But the Grizzlies feel that there is some unfinished business.
“It has been a dream season . . . an absolute dream season,” says Mick, who was honoured as the KIJHL’s coach of the year in his first season back behind the bench. “We’ve had a 40-point increase . . . this is the furthest this team has gone in its history.
“It’s a fairy tale-type of season but we’ve got one more trophy we want to hoist.”

gdrinnan@kamloopsnews.ca
gdrinnan.blogspot.com