Marlin Murray, the general manager and head coach of the MJHL’s Dauphin Kings, got a bit excited on Thursday night. The Kings dropped a 5-1 decison to the host Winnipeg Saints. There were 448 fans in the St. James Civic Centre and you can bet they’ll be talking today about what they saw last night. Dauphin was 0-8 on the PP, while the Saints were, uhh, 4-16. . . . D Emerson Hrynyk, who has played in the WHL with Prince Albert and Chilliwack, totalled 36 minutes in penalties. All told, Dauphin picked up 124 minutes; the Saints took 46. . . . Presumably, Murray was a tad upset with referees Brett Montsion and Ryan Galley, because he emptied the bench of anything that wasn’t tied down. . . . And it’s all right here. . . . By the way, the Saints lead the series 3-1 with Game 5 in Dauphin on Saturday. I’m thinking Murray won’t be in the building for this one.
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Less than 24 hours after Greg (Spike) Wallace was presented with a WHL Distinguished Service Award, he and the Kamloops Blazers parted company.
The Blazers issued a news release Thursday morning stating that the organization and Wallace had decided to end their relationship “by mutual agreement.”
According to the release, Wallace is leaving “to pursue other initiatives.”
“The Blazers and Spike have agreed that now would be an appropriate time for Spike to venture forward and pursue new opportunities,” the news release reads.
Wallace, the Blazers’ community and sponsorship co-ordinator, had been with the Blazers since 1984. A 54-year-old native of Kamloops, he started out as the team’s trainer and equipment manager. He had been in his latest role since 2005.
On Wednesday, prior to the Blazers’ 5-1 victory over the visiting Portland Winterhawks, WHL president Ron Robison presented Wallace with the Distinguished Service Award, which, according to the league, is presented “to an individual associated with the WHL who has made an extraordinary contribution over an extended period of time . . .”
The crowd of 5,693, the third-largest in franchise history, gave Wallace a standing ovation.

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These are Happy Days for Spike

Greg (Spike) Wallace has watched a lot of WHL games during his
career with the Kamloops Blazers and Victoria Cougars.
(Photo by Murray Mitchell / Kamloops Daily News)

By GREGG DRINNAN
Daily News Sports Editor

Brendan Ranford, the longest-serving member of this edition of the Kamloops Blazers, says Greg (Spike) Wallace is a “legend.”
Upon hearing that, Ryan Huska, a former Blazers player who now is head coach of the Kelowna Rockets, bursts into laughter.
“That was one of his nicknames,” Huska says. “He had so many nicknames and that was one of them.”
The legend of Spike Wallace will grow again tonight at Interior Savings Centre as he is to be presented with a WHL Distinguished Service Award prior to a game between the Blazers and Portland Winterhawks.
According to the WHL, the award is “presented annually to an individual associated with the WHL who has made an extraordinary contribution over an extended period of time” to the league or a team. The late Doris Rubel, the Blazers’ long-time billet co-ordinator, was honoured with the award during 2004-05.
“I’m pretty thrilled,” says Wallace, 54, who is the Blazers’ community and sponsorship co-ordinator. “Only one person in each conference wins it every year. So to be selected, I was thrilled.
“I realize it’s the teams that I have worked with and the players and management we have had over the years that have helped me.”
As for the nickname, he has been wearing it since he was in Grade 8, or ever since someone noticed a resemblance between him and the character Spike, who was Fonzie’s nephew, on early episodes of the then-popular TV show Happy Days.
These days, Wallace no longer orders skates and tapes ankles. Instead, he keeps busy booking player appearances throughout the community, including numerous school visits, working with a couple of programs involving minor hockey, and keeping in touch with the RCMP as part of the EDGE program.
In other words, tonight is a long way from the days when he started with the organization.
In fact, his first stint with Kamloops lasted about 10 days and, as Wallace says, “I never worked a day for them.”
Wallace, a Kamloops native, signed on as the trainer/equipment manager for the Kamloops Jr. Oilers over the summer of 1982. However, the team, then owned by the NHL’s Edmonton Oilers, soon hired a new general manager and head coach in Bill LaForge and he brought along is own trainer, Ron Coleman.
Wallace was released without having worked even one day at his new job.
He followed up by sending his resume to the Victoria Cougars and soon was on his way to Vancouver Island where Dave Andrews, now the president of the American Hockey League, was the head coach.
In the meantime, the winds of change were blowing through Kamloops where a group of local businessmen banded together and purchased the Jr. Oilers. The franchise was renamed the Blazers and soon had a new trainer.
Wallace had reapplied after the franchise changed hands. He met head coach Ken Hitchcock at an under-16 tournament at the Sungod Recreation Centre in Delta, and later spent some time with Gary Cooper and Colin Day, both of whom were involved in purchasing the club.
“I figured a Kamloops guy could have the job here so I reapplied,” Wallace says.
The rest, as they say, is history and it isn’t at all farfetched to suggest that after all these years he is the face of the franchise in the community.
“He was a lot of things to us when we played here,” says Huska, who won three Memorial Cup titles during his time (1992-95) with the Blazers. “Not only was he our trainer and equipment guy around the dressing room, he was a good friend to a lot of the guys here. Players felt comfortable with him. . . . He did a great job of running our room and keeping young guys happy and feeling part of the group.”
Even though Wallace no longer is a regular in the Blazers’ dressing room, he still has relationships with the players.
“He’s got a lot of stories that he tells us about being in the old room . . . he’s been around for a while, you can say that,” Ranford says. “He’s good friends with Ken Hitchcock and he still keeps in touch with a lot of players who are in the NHL. You hear the names and you’re in awe because those players, even when I was growing up, were in the NHL and they are elite hockey players.”
Huska says the friendships are part and parcel of being in the Kamloops organization.
“You feel a part of something here and he was a big part of that,” Huska says. “When the old guys come back he always hunts them down and guys always make sure they go out of their way to find him as well. That says a lot about him and what he means to each individual player and this organization.”
JUST NOTES: Game time at Interior Savings Centre is 7 p.m. . . . The Winterhawks (46-16-4) lead the WHL’s overall standings, by one point over the Edmonton Oil Kings and Tri-City Americans. The Blazers (44-17-4) are three points back. . . . The Blazers put playoff tickets on sale yesterday. They are likely to open at home on March 23 and 24. . . . Kamloops is 15-2-2 against U.S. Division teams. That includes a 1-2-0 record against Portland. . . . The Blazers list F Chase Schaber as day-to-day with a lower body injury. He appeared to injure his left leg late in the first period of Friday’s 6-3 loss to the visiting Kelowna Rockets, although he did finish the game. Schaber, who was plagued by leg injuries last season, played in Saturday’s 4-3 OT loss in Kelowna.


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Doug Soetaert was fired Thursday as the Everett Silvertips' general manager.
(Photo from the Silvertips' website)

The Everett Silvertips played their first WHL season in 2003-04.
They finished atop the U.S. Division, going 35-27-8-2 (the 8 being ties) and, incredibly enough, getting all the way to the WHL’s championship final where they lost to the Medicine Hat Tigers.
The Silvertips were in their first season in the WHL; the Tigers were in their 34th. In the previous 10 seasons, the Tigers had, in order, been bounced in the first round four times, missed the playoffs five times and lost in the second round once.
I bring this up because the Silvertips fired general manager Doug Soetaert on Thursday.
Soetaert, 55, was named the Silvertips’ vice-president and GM on April 16, 2002, a position he filled until May 16, 2005, when he left to work as the GM of an AHL franchise in Omaha that was hooked up with the NHL’s Calgary Flames. He stayed there one season, then returned to Everett.
Soetaert, a former WHL goaltender, built a franchise that won three U.S. Division titles and a Western Conference championship in its formative years. The Silvertips also finished atop the WHL’s overall standings in 2006-07, when they went 54-15-3.
Two seasons ago, Everett went 46-21-5 and finished in a tie with the Tri-City Americans for top spot in the U.S. Division and the Western Conference. The Americans, however, won one more game (47-46) than did Everett, so was awarded the pennant.
The last two seasons, however, haven’t been as kind to Everett. It was 28-33-11 last season, after which head coach Craig Hartsburg left to join the Flames’ coaching staff. You may recall, too, that the season was disrupted somewhat when Hartsburg left the team to undergo a heart procedure.
This season, under head coach Mark Ferner, the Silvertips are 12-30-9 and may well miss the playoffs for the first time in the franchise’s history.
Prior to this season, Soetaert admitted that he was beginning a full-scale rebuild. This wasn’t a reload. This would be a complete rebuild.
Soetaert now won’t be around to see his plan to fruition.
“Doug's contract was expiring this year, and we've been spending months evaluating our direction," Silvertips president Gary Gelinas told Nick Patterson of the Everett Herald. "We made the decision not to renew his contract. We decided to make the decision sooner rather than later so we could find the right individual to bring in and lead the organization.”
Gelinas also told Patterson that no other changes are expected for the time being.
The Silvertips are owned by Bill Yuill, who sold the Seattle Thunderbirds in order to purchase the expansion franchise for Everett. Gelinas is the franchise’s president and governor.
Firing Soetaert at this particular point in time is a risky proposition and, on the face of it, doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense.
Soetaert has more than proven himself in this league and, one might have thought, had earned a chance to right the ship.
You also have to wonder how secure Ferner is feeling this morning. He left a situation with the BCHL’s Vernon Vipers in which he could have stayed indefinitely. Under Ferner, the Vipers had made three straight trips to the RBC Cup, the national junior A championship tournament, winning two of them.
With Soetaert gone, assistant GM Zoran Rajcic and Ferner will handle those duties.
Now, with a new GM to come in sometime in the next few months, you have to wonder just how safe the coaching staff will be once this season ends.
As one WHL team official told me last night: “It’s a (crappy) game sometimes.”
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ASK THE COMMISSIONER:
Why only allow players to have until Dec. 31 of the completion of their 21-year-old season to play professional and then force them to make a decision about pro vs. school? Why not give them a full season or two . . . or five? Also, how much is currently in the WHL education fund and how much gets used?
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JUST NOTES: D Corbin Baldwin of the Spokane Chiefs has drawn a two-game suspension after taking a major and game misconduct for a check to the head in a 4-1 loss to the Blazers in Kamloops on Wednesday night. With the score tied 1-1 in the third period, Baldwin laid out Kamloops F Dylan Willick with an elbow to the head. . . . I would love to show that video to OHL commissioner David Branch and ask him what a check like that would be worth in the OHL. . . . Baldwin won’t play against the visiting Victoria Royals tonight or against the host Kootenay Ice on Saturday. . . .
Rose Mary Hartney and Greg (Spike) Wallace are the recipients of the WHL Distinguished Service Award for this season. Hartney, who has worked at Vanier Collegiate in Moose Jaw for 38 years, has been a long-time education advisor to the Warriors. Wallace has been around the WHL for a long while, first in Victoria and now Kamloops. He joined the Blazers as their trainer/equipment manager in 1984 and now is their community and sponsorship co-ordinator. . . .
The Vancouver Giants will wear special sweaters tonight for a game against the visiting Kamloops Blazers. Zip on over to the Giants’ website for a look at the sweaters that will honour Gordie Howe.
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Patrick Roy, the GM and head coach of the Quebec Remparts, has been fined again. This time he’ll pay $5,000 for comments he made concerning Gilles Courteau, the league’s commissioner. That story is right here.
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Writers from The Associated Press have spent the last two months interviewing ex-NFL players about concussions.
Here is how the story, written by Howard Fendrich, Martha Irvine, and Nancy Armour begins:
The helmet-to-helmet shot knocked Tony Dorsett out cold in the second quarter of a 1984 Cowboys-Eagles game, the hardest hit he ever took during his Hall of Fame NFL career.
“It was like a freight train hitting a Volkswagen,” Dorsett says now.
“Did they know it was a concussion?” he asks rhetorically during an interview with The Associated Press. “They thought I was half-dead.”
This is a lengthy and frightening story. It is right here.
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The Globe and Mail has decried fighting in junior hockey. In a crisp, four-paragraph editorial headlined ‘The game’s dark side,’ the newspaper notes that “there is no earthly reason to put teenagers’ brains through a meat grinder to keep purists happy.”
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Brent Peterson, a former player and coach with the Portland Winterhawks, will be inducted into the organization’s Hall of Fame tonight prior to a game against the visiting Everett Silvertips. Jim Beseda of the Oregonian checked in with Peterson, who has been battling Parkinson’s disease. And the picture with the story tells it all — a smile on his face and a golf club in his left hand. That story is right here.