Derkatch revisits scene of devastating loss

It’s been almost 25 years since lightning hit the Regina Pats’ outhouse that
night in Memorial Arena.
Dale Derkatch was there that night, one of the key players on a very good
Regina team that was coached by Bob Strumm.
At the invitation of someone who has known him for a long time, Derkatch,
now the Pats’ head coach, revisited the scene of the crime Thursday
afternoon. It was interesting to watch his face as the memories came
flooding back.
He had revisited Memorial Arena once before, having coached the Notre Dame
Hounds at KIBIHT a few seasons ago. But on that occasion he had other things
on his mind than 1984.
“The faceoff was right there,” he says. He is standing to the left of the
arena entrance and pointing to the nearest faceoff circle.
The faceoff, Derkatch recalls, came about after Dean Evason, the starry
centre of Bill LaForge’s Kamloops Junior Oilers, had been stymied on a
breakaway, Regina goaltender Jamie Reeve making the save and preserving a
3-2 lead with 20 seconds remaining in the third period.
It was May 8, 1984 and there were at least 18,000 people in the old barn —
really, do you know anyone who wasn’t there? — hoping their favourites would
be able to find some life. With time running out, however, the Pats held a
3-2 lead in the best-of-seven WHL championship final. And they led the game,
3-2. They were 20 ticks of the clock away . . .
Derkatch’s right hand comes up and he starts pointing. Off the faceoff, the
puck went into the corner. That one right there. Then it went back to the
point . . . right there. Then it came down the wall and the centring pass
went to Evason who was right there . . . and he points to the low slot.
Evason, who would go on to coach the Blazers and now is an assistant coach
with the NHL’s Washington Capitals, a team for which Derkatch once scouted,
beat Reeve to tie the game.
There were 12 seconds left in the third period. Twelve ticks of the clock .
. .
To hear Derkatch tell it, Ryan Stewart’s overtime winner 13 minutes later
was anticlimactic.
“I still remember crying in the dressing room while wearing my sweater,” he
told Rob Vanstone of the Regina Leader-Post. “I had family at the game. My
grandparents and my aunt and uncle were waiting for me outside the dressing
room. I didn’t want to go out of the dressing room and see them.
“Awful . . .”
As for Game 7, which was played the next night . . .
“It’s tough to come back from losing like that,” said Derkatch, who scored
both his club’s goals in a 4-2 loss.
The passage of time heals most wounds and this one, it seems, is almost at
that point. Except for this one little scab.
“The victory was a credit to them,” Derkatch says, adding that he came to
know many of the Kamloops players. “They’re good guys . . . good people.”
Pause . . .
“But,” he adds, “I really feel that we were the better team. We had more
experience. They had some young guys . . . like (Rob) Brown and (Greg)
Hawgood . . . guys who were just starting out.”
The conversation adjourns to a coffee shop across the street. The spectre of
the old rink looms large as Derkatch talks hockey.
What kind of person is Dale Derkatch, who isn’t an inch taller than his
playing height of 5-foot-5? As he pours cream into his coffee, a couple of
drops end up on the floor. He grabs a napkin and wipes the counter and the
floor. That tells you a lot about the guy who was known as The Rat when he
played.
What he lacked in stature, he made up for with an unmatched intensity and a
desire to score goals. He loved to score the way you and I love to breathe.
Because he was 5-foot-5 — well, he still is — he says there are people who
expect his teams to be small. They are wrong.
“When I played, I liked me,” he explains with a chuckle, “and everyone else
big, and that’s how it used to be.”
When he played, he totaled 491 points, 222 of them goals, in 204
regular-season WHL games. You wonder if his players, and those on other
teams for that matter, realize that this man played the game like a maestro.
His stick was his baton and the game was his music.
“Dale was ahead of the game, anticipating what was going to happen, and then
making it happen with skill and passion,” Strumm, now a pro scout for the
NHL’s Columbus Blue Jackets, says. “The passion was second to none. I’ve
never seen anyone like it . . . a love of the game and a passion for
winning.”
Derkatch is older now — he is 44 — and he’s got a world of experience behind
him. He has played in Europe — in Italy, Finland, Germany and Switzerland —
and spent four years as the director of hockey at the Athol Murray College
of Notre Dame in Wilcox, Sask. He was responsible for 12 teams there — male,
female and all ages through junior A.
It says something about Derkatch that during his stay there he spent one
season coaching the school’s second midget team. It is a team that doesn’t
win very often. Today, the first team is atop the Saskatchewan midget AAA
league standings, at 14-3-0-1. The other team, the one Derkatch coached, is
1-16-1-0. It happens like that every season.
Derkatch had tasted success everywhere he had played. Now that he was into
coaching, he thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to find out how the
other half lived.
“I wanted to experience losing,” he says.
It was, he says, a very worthwhile exercise. He learned about motivating
athletes who know going in that their chances for success are slim. It was,
he admits, a challenge to give them something different each day.
But he persevered. And he grew.
And today he’s back in Regina as the head coach of the team whose logo and
tradition have always meant so much to him.
Unlike Notre Dame, where he had his fingers in all the pies, now, he says,
“I just coach hockey . . . and I love it.”
He loves the practices just like he did when he played.
“There isn’t the stress of games during practices,” he reasons. “Even at 30,
I loved to practice. I don’t see how guys don’t like it.”
And he slowly is getting used to the changes in the game, many of them
brought on by expansion — there are 22 teams now; there were 13 in
Derkatch’s rookie season (1981-82).
That season, at 17, Derkatch was on Regina’s third line. He totaled 142
points in 71 games. Do the math.
As a head coach, he has a centre, Jordan Weal, on his first line who is 16
years of age.
“He’s good,” Derkatch says. And then, with a grin, he adds: “I could play
with him.”
With that, Derkatch walks out of the coffee shop and begins the stroll back
to the hotel in which the Pats are ensconced.
As he crosses the street, he glances one more time at Memorial Arena, a
place where memories were made.

gdrinnan@kamloopsnews.ca