Raiders, Warriors deal . . . Which WHL coach "is as funny as funny can be"?

G Kristofer Westblom (Kelowna, 2004-08) has been released by Gap (France, Ligue Magnus). Last season, with the Brampton Beast (CHL), he was 3.22 and .903 in 41 games.
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THE DEAL: The Prince Albert Raiders get F Colton McCarthy, 18, from the Moose Jaw Warriors for a sixth-round selection in the 2016 bantam draft.
THE SKINNY: McCarthy was born in Moose Jaw, but calls Salmon Arm, B.C., home. He has played two seasons in Moose Jaw. He had six goals and five assists in 63 games last season, after earning six points, two of them goals, in 39 goals as a freshman.
THE ANALYSIS: McCarthy, at 6-foot-0 and 190 pounds, brings some grit and some size to the right side of the Raiders’ forward ranks. He scored 22 goals in 32 junior B games with the Nelson Leafs and the Raiders would like to see a bit more of that scoring touch.
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It’s not that long ago when the issue of concussions in sport seemed to be a North American problem. Now, though, it is getting international attention. . . . Professor Willie Stewart, an expert who advises the International Rugby Board, has told the Daily Mail: “In just 12 months sports concussion has moved from an almost exclusively American sports issue to one that is now a major issue for global sport.” . . . Sports fans in Britain began to take notice when Ben Robinson, 14, died after sustaining a concussion after being allowed to continue playing with a concussion. “The most noticeable change since the start of the Mail on Sunday Concussion Campaign, has been the fact ‘The Elephant in the Room’ has escaped,” Robinson’s father, Peter, told the Mail on Sunday. “Concussion is now in the public domain and no longer controlled by sporting bodies. Phrases such as ‘Concussion can be fatal’ and ‘If in doubt sit them out’ can be mentioned without feeling we have to produce a death certificate to justify it.” . . . Sam Peters of the Daily Mail has more right here.
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“Another NFL season begins,” writes Gary Mihoces of USA TODAY, “and the concussion carousel already is spinning.” . . . According to Mihoces, “The NFL reports it has averaged 247 concussions per season (preseason and regular season) over the past three years. Last year's total of 228 was down 13 percent from 2012.” . . . His complete story is right here.
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Today is the first Sunday of the NFL’s 2014 season, and perhaps you are wondering: Is it wrong to watch football? . . . That is a question posed to Chuck Klosterman, The Ethicist, at The New York Times. . . . A letter writer asked The Ethicist: “Is it unethical to support a league that seems to know it is detrimental to the health of its participants?” . . . Read The Ethicist’s response right here, then ask yourself this: Is it unethical to watch a game in which teenagers are allowed to punch each other in the face?
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The Medicine Hat Tigers were without G Jared Rathjen when they beat the Calgary Hitmen 4-2 in High River, Alta., on Saturday night. Apparently, Rathjen, 20, isn’t injured. . . . “He’s not injured. He’s just not healthy,” Shaun Clouston, the Tigers’ general manager and head coach, told Ryan McCracken of the Medicine Hat News. “He’s got a further evaluation, he just hasn’t been cleared.” . . . Uhh, OK. Thanks for clearing that up. . . . G Marek Langhamer, the Czech 20-year-old, was to play last night. He will go to camp with the NHL’s Arizona Coyotes and could play in their organization. The Tigers, then, are likely to open the season with Rathjen, who was acquired from the Victoria Royals over the summer, and Nick Schneider, 17, as their goaltenders. . . . Assuming that Rathjen regains his health, that is.
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Steve O’Rourke used to play for the Tri-City Americans. These days, the 40-year-old is an assistant coach with the Red Deer Rebels. This weekend, he was back in Kennewick, Wash., with the Rebels, who are playing in the Red Lion Hotel tournament. Annie Fowler of the Tri-City Herald reminisces with O’Rourke right here. . . . WARNING: This story includes this potentially myth-busting quote from O’Rourke, in reference to Rebels owner/GM/head coach Brent Sutter: “Brent is as funny as funny can be. It’s always a good time around the office, the dressing room and the bus.”
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The Kamloops Blazers have named Peter Soberlak as their mental performance coach. Soberlak, 45, is a Kamloops native who had been working with the Kelowna Rockets. He played with the Blazers as a 16-year-old (1985-86), before being dealt to the Swift Current Broncos early the next season. He was on the Broncos’ bus that crashed on Dec. 30, 1986, and later was on the Swift Current team that won the 1989 Memorial Cup. These days, Soberlak is the chair of the physical education department at Thompson Rivers U in Kamloops. He has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from UBC and a master’s degree in sport and exercise psychology at Queen’s U in Kingston, Ont. . . . I wrote this piece right here on Soberlak three years ago.
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The Moose Jaw Warriors have signed F Tanner Jeannot, a 17-year-old from Oxbow, Sask. Jeannot, a list player, had 36 points, including 15 goals, with the midget AAA Yorkton Harvest last season. The 6-foot-2, 190-pounder was the Harvest’s rookie of the year, most dedicated player and scholastic player of the year. . . . Jeannot made his WHL debut on Saturday night, going pointless in Moose Jaw's 5-2 victory over the visiting Swift Current Broncos.
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The Seattle Thunderbirds and CBS Radio Seattle have signed a three-year agreement that covers all regular-season and playoff games, which will be heard on 1090 The Fan and streamed at 1090TheFan.com. The deal also includes a weekly 30-minute Coach’s Show that will feature Thunderbirds head coach Steve Konowalchuk. The plan is to run the show on Tuesdays, starting at 6 p.m. . . . F Stelio Mattheos of Winnipeg, who was the first pick in the 2014 bantam draft, made his WHL debut with the Brandon Wheat Kings on Friday night. Mattheos recorded two assists as the Wheat Kings got past the visiting Regina Pats, 8-6. . . . Last night, Regina F Sam Steel scored twice as the host Pats beat the Wheaties, 4-1. Steel had two goals and an assist, giving him 10 points, including six goals, in three exhibition games. . . . F Jansen Harkins, who has nine points in three exhibition games, didn’t play last night as his Prince George Cougars beat the visiting Edmonton Oil Kings, 4-2. . . . F Ty Mappin was in Saskatoon’s lineup for the first time as the Blades beat the Prince Albert Raiders, 4-0, in Warman, Sask. Mappin, the seventh overall pick in the 2011 bantam draft by the Everett Silvertips, suffered a brain injury in the Blades’ intrasquad game on Aug. 24. The Blades acquired him from Everett over the off-season.
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Picture of the day. Check out the last names on the back of these jerseys pic.twitter.com/L5ABNJDuzR
— Matt Barber (@dixiefriedsport) September 6, 2014

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Now is the time for enlightened discussion

By PETER SOBERLAK

Brian Burke’s recent statement in reaction to the Miami Dolphins' scandal and questions posed to him about hazing and bullying should be taken with a grain of salt.
Certainly, as the leader of an organization -- he is the president of hockey operations with the NHL's Calgary Flames —  it is commendable to make players and staff aware of a "no hazing" policy and address the issue in a proactive fashion. However, unless there are programs and policies in place that educate and make individuals aware of the issues at a deeper level, the effort is futile.
Bullying, abuse and harassment is not only about the overt physical assaults and public humiliation that take place in many hazing rituals, it also is about the invisible psychological trauma that victims suffer from in isolation that needs to be addressed.
We need to look at victims of bullying and abuse as individuals and refrain from painting all athletes or employees with the same brush.
Burke's example of how he would deal with locker-room bullying if it were him ("Now I know as a player, if I felt I was getting bullied, I know what I'd do — I'd end it right there in the dressing room. Whether I wanted to fight or not, I'd fight the guy. I'm amazed that this has gotten to where it is without the players dealing with this.") — is an extremely narrow-minded and unrealistic approach to addressing an issue that has become a major concern in all aspects of society.
Would it be appropriate for an individual working in the front office who was being harassed either physically or emotionally to physically assault a colleague to deal with the situation? Why is it any different in a locker-room setting?
The main issue with bullying, abuse and harassment is that it affects different people in different ways. The suck-it-up-and-punch-him-out approach mentality is simply archaic and short-sighted, and I would expect more from a man of Burke’s experience and knowledge.
I would hope that with the recent attention to the issue of bullying, abuse and harassment in the work place, leaders such as Brian Burke would refrain from taking a defensive approach, grounded in denial and bravado, and seize the opportunity to encourage discussion that is realistic, acceptable and productive.

(Peter Soberlak is a former WHL player who now is the chair of the physical education department at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops. He has a bachelor's degree in psychology from UBC and a master's degree in sport and exercise psychology from Queen's University. He works in sports psychology with TRU's athletic teams and with the WHL's Kelowna Rockets.)

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Denial no longer is acceptable

Peter Soberlak is a former WHL player who now is the chair of the physical education department at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops. He has a bachelor's degree in psychology from UBC and a master's degree in sport and exercise psychology from Queen's University. He works in sports psychology with TRU's athletic teams and with the WHL's Kelowna Rockets.
Beginning today, Soberlak becomes a contributor to Taking Note.
His first piece is his reaction to a column by Iain MacIntyre that appeared in the Nov. 8 edition of the Vancouver Sun. That column was headlined: NHL needs to watch for NFL-style brutality.
It can be found right here.


By PETER SOBERLAK

Response to Iain MacIntyre’s column in the Vancouver Sun regarding the recent scandal that has enveloped the NFL's Miami Dolphins . . .
"I don't think it can happen (in the NHL)," Phoenix Coyotes captain Shane Doan told MacIntyre. "There are so many more football players on a team, and I think sometimes those numbers can work against you. In hockey, it's just a tighter group because there are fewer people. There are only 23 players and, for the most part, if something is going on, there are so many good people in the rooms — at least in the rooms that I've been involved in — that they won't let that happen."
"Different situation," San Jose Sharks head coach Todd McLellan said. "I don't know what happens in every locker-room in the National Hockey League. I know what happens in ours; we're a family. We don't all get along all the time. There are some battles and bickering, but the family itself takes care of it."
Laurence Gilman, the Vancouver Canucks’ vice-president of hockey operations and assistant general manager, said simply: "Our team and our game is built on a foundation of respect. I don't think what happened (with the Dolphins) could ever remotely happen in our locker-room."
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In fact, abuse, bullying and harassment is happening at some level in almost every locker-room, in every league, in every town, and on every team in organized sport, including the NHL.
To publicly deny this is showing a lack of respect and knowledge, and furthermore, sweeping an extremely important societal issue under the carpet, while discrediting and alienating individuals who have been victims of abuse, bullying and harassment at the hands of teammates and coaches.
Instead, these individuals who are seen as role models should publicly acknowledge that this is an issue that needs attention, awareness, and understanding, so organizations can develop the tools and strategies to deal with harassment and abuse.
Abuse and harassment is fundamentally based on the notion of one person’s power and influence over another person. Regardless of the number or size of the group, bystanders also are responsible for accepting and often encouraging this behaviour, which unfortunately is at the core of elite sport culture through its focus on competition, the traditions of hazing and the idea of earning one’s rite of passage to acceptance from teammates and coaches.
Most often, the abuse victim remains silent out of fear for repercussions from the abuser, the peer group, or the institution at large.
Individuals who suffer through abusive situations need a voice and an avenue to be heard in order to heal. This starts with education, awareness and understanding of the issues within these organizations. Sport is an extremely influential and pervasive component of society and should be used as a vehicle to educate and promote acceptance and understanding of abuse, bullying and harassment. Denial simply is not acceptable any longer.

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Could Soberlak have been a contender?

Peter Soberlak watched hockey’s horrible summer from afar, all the time with a queasy feeling in his stomach.
He heard about and read about the deaths of Wade Belak, Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien and Barry Potomski. And, like everyone else, Soberlak wondered about a connection between their premature deaths and their roles as hockey fighters.
Soberlak wondered, too, because there was a time when hockey people tried to push him down that road.
There was a time when Soberlak was the complete package.
As a teenager, he was 6-foot-3 and 175 pounds. He had soft hands. He had passion. He could skate. He could shoot. He could do it all.
Yes, he could fight. He had long arms, great balance on his skates and he could throw a punch. Oh, how he could fight!
There was, however, one teensy-weensy, itsy-bitsy little problem.
Soberlak hated fighting. Still does, in fact. It’s interesting, because he loves hockey. He loves its flow and speed and skill and emotion and passion. He loves it when it is played properly. But he absolutely hates the fighting and he does so with every ounce of his being.
In fact, you could make the case that he is what he is today because of that hatred.
As a 16-year-old with his hometown Kamloops Blazers, Soberlak fought five times, taking out Regina Pats defenceman Selmar Odelein with one punch in the third of those bouts.
Even then, Soberlak says, he was telling himself: “I hate this; I can’t do this every night.”
In his last fight with the Blazers, on Oct. 24, 1986, Soberlak laid out Spokane Chiefs forward Rocky Dundas with two punches.
In his only other scrap that season, after being dealt to the Swift Current Broncos, Soberlak took care of Saskatoon Blades toughie Kelly Chase, who would go on to acclaim as an NHL pugilistic specialist. The two met up again the following season. This time, Soberlak says, it took him two punches.
According to dropyourgloves.com, Soberlak only had two fights that season — he admits to having lost the other one when Gary Dickie  of the Pats somehow got inside on him and dropped him with an uppercut.
One night in December 1988, Soberlak fought Curtis Folkett of the Brandon Wheat Kings. To this day, Soberlak is convinced that Folkett was “told to go out and fight me.”
“I literally crushed the side of his face,” Soberlak says. “That bothered me for a long time.”
All the while, Soberlak was getting eaten up inside. His coaches, here and in Swift Current, wanted more of the fisticuffs. He just wanted to play the game. He skated alongside Joe Sakic one season and ended up with 99 points, including 43 goals. Soberlak just didn’t equate fighting with toughness — still doesn’t, in fact — but by now, as he says, “It kept following me.”
One day he woke up to find that a poll in the Regina Leader-Post had him rated among the WHL’s top five fighters.
“All of a sudden, I’m a fighter?” Soberlak recalls. He remembers thinking: “What’s going on here?”
He was a first-round selection by the Edmonton Oilers in the 1987 NHL draft. And there came a day when the Oilers’ brass sent him down to the AHL’s Cape Breton Oilers to work on that part of his game. Soberlak says he told Glen Sather, John Muckler and Ted Green: “ ‘I am not doing this.’ . . . I went home.”
Later, no less an authority than Bob Clarke, then in the front office of the Philadelphia Flyers and a man who had an on-ice seat as the Broad Street Bullies wreaked havoc across the NHL, told Soberlak he was “soft.”
Soberlak thought about it and realized that Clarke meant he wasn’t fighting enough.
In the end, an ankle injury suffered in junior would finish Soberlak’s career. But, had he chosen to, he could have played with the wonky ankle and fought his way to a career.
“As a person, I couldn’t do that,” says Soberlak. “You are physically assaulting someone . . . it is a violent physical assault.
“Because of my upbringing, my values, my personality . . .”
As he tells his sociology class at TRU, he didn’t have three older brothers to beat the tar out of him as he was growing up. Instead, he was blessed with three older sisters who made him play with an Easy-Bake Oven and watch Little House on the Prairie.
Soberlak left hockey and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in psychology at UBC. He then completed a master’s degree in sport and exercise psychology at Queen’s U in Kingston. He now is the chair of the physical education department at TRU. He works in sports psychology with TRU’s athletic teams and with the WHL’s Kelowna Rockets.
During one stop in his career, Soberlak’s roomie was the team’s enforcer. That relationship gave Soberlak a front row seat to what these men go through.
“I watched him struggle with his job,” Soberlak says. “That role is the hardest thing in sports to deal with.”
Soberlak then goes one step further and likens it to the toughest jobs on Earth, like, say, the crab fishermen on the TV show Deadliest Catch.
“Except,” as Soberlak says, “nobody is trying to punch their faces in.”

(Gregg Drinnan is the sports editor of The Daily News. He is at gdrinnan@kamloopsnews.ca, gdrinnan.blogspot.com and twitter.com/gdrinnan.)

If you’re wondering why the Kelowna Rockets have turned into one of the CHL’s top franchises, consider that president and GM Bruce Hamilton won’t hesitate to add staff if there is a chance it might benefit the players. Just prior to the start of this season, Hamilton added former WHLer Peter Soberlak to the staff. Soberlak, the chair of the physical education department at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, works with the Rockets in the area of sports psychology. . . . And now the Rockets have added Aaron Konecsni as a skating coach. Konecsni, 30, is from Kelowna and is the head hockey skating and skills coach at Redline High Performance Hockey, a business he began in 1998. “We assess, improve and refine individuals’ hockey skating techniques,” Konecsni told the Kelown Capital News. He has been working with the Rockets at practices and also on the skating treadmill at Redline. “Almost all players, whether they’re considered a great skater or not, have inefficient tendencies that can be fixed once we diagnose what those tendencies are,” Konecsni said.
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Here’s a look at which WHLers will play in the World Junior Championship that opens Sunday in Buffalo:
The U.S.’s roster includes two WHLers -- F Mitchell (Dirty Harry) Callahan of the Kelowna Rockets and F Emerson Etem of the Medicine Hat Tigers.
The final Swiss roster includes F Nino Niederreiter and F Sven Bartschi, both of the Portland Winterhawks, but doesn’t include D Dave Sutter of the Seattle Thunderbirds.
D Rasmus Rissanen of the Everett Silvertips is on Finland’s final roster.
Included on Slovakia’s roster are G Juraj Holly of the Calgary Hitmen, D Martin Marincin of the Prince George Cougrars, F Dalibor Bortnak of the Kamloops Blazers and F Andrej Kudrna of the Red Deer Rebels.
F Marcel Noebels of Seattle and F Bernhard Keil of Kamloops made the German roster.
The Canadian roster includes D Jared Cowen of the Spokane Chiefs, D Tyson Barrie of the Kelowna Rockets, F Carter Ashton of the Tri-City Americans, F Brett Connolly of Prince George, F Cody Eakin of the Swift Current Broncos, F Curtis Hamilton of the Saskatoon Blades, F Quinton Howden of the Moose Jaw Warriors, F Ryan Johansen of Portland, and F Brayden Schenn of the Brandon Wheat Kings.
The Czech Republic roster includes F Antonin Honejsek of Moose Jaw, and F Robin Soudek and F Roman Horak, both of the Chilliwack Bruins. . . . It doesn’t include two other WHLers -- D David Musil of the Vancouver Giants or D Marek Hrbas of the Edmonton Oil Kings. . . . Musil’s chance of making the team may have been done in by a leg injury he suffered while blocking a shot a couple of weeks ago. He ended up with what was first reported as a hairline fracture of the fibula in his right leg, but was later said to be a deep bone bruise.
Included on Norway’s roster is F Andreas Stene of Kelowna.
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Larry McNabb, a veteran of the hockey wars, lost his battle with cancer on Dec. 24 at 8 a.m. He was 71. McNabb never did play even one game in the NHL as most of his lengthy pro career was spent in the old Western Hockey League, with the Spokane Comets, Vancouver Canucks, San Francisco Seals, San Diego Gulls, Sal Lake Golden Eagles, Seattle Totems and Portland Buckaroos. . . . The Nanaimo Daily News has more on the life and death of a hockey legend right here.

gdrinnan@kamloopsnews.ca
gdrinnan.blogspot.com
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