A few changes round' the league

A few changes around the KIJHL for the 2009-10 season but we’ll start locally in the Eddie Mountain Division where the Kimberley Dynamiters announced that Kevin MacKay will be the new Head Coach and GM for the upcoming season. Longtime Rider fans will know that MacKay was in Fernie a couple of years ago where he won a KIJHL Championship in 2006-07. MacKay was in Pentiction as a minor hockey Coach Coordinator for a couple of years since his departure from Fernie. All this happened because Wayne Keiver stepped down at the end of last season after having had a well documented heart problem midway through last season. Now we got even more reason to hate Kimberley.

The Columbia Valley Rockies let their coach Darrin Naylor go last January and have since hired Rob Rice as their Coach and TJ Belanger as their GM. Belanger is a former Rocky player and former assistant coach and Rice is a local Realtor who has filled in as coach a few times before .

Meanwhile in Revelstoke coach Brad Fox quit last year to work at getting the new Williams Lake Jr “A” team ready to go for the 2009-10 season. But Fox resigned in the new year and moved back to coach Revelstoke again mid season. The Fox saga continued again this spring when Revelstoke caught everyone off guard and sold the team to a group of four investors that included Troy Mick, a former Royal Bank Cup winning coach (twice) who also has a WHL resume as both player and coach. That as you may have guessed excluded Brad Fox. Troy Mick is a proven winner who will put huge pressure on all the other teams recruiting this summer. Wanna bet these guys are looking to host the Keystone Cup ?

In Grand Forks four year Coach and GM Rob Fitzpatrick was not brought back this year and Jesse Dorrans was hired to run the show and in Chase former NHL er Tyler Boldt moved up from assistant to Head Coach.

Bad news for unsuspecting Summerland Sting fans who came home after work one day in May to find the furniture, the wife, and all twenty-three kids were gone, and they didn’t have a hockey team anymore either. The Okanagan Hockey School left their former spouses in Summerland, changed their name to the Lakers, and moved to Pentiction. Summerland’s only hope is for a rich owner to come forward and give them a team again. The KIJHL just can’t resist a rich owner.-(See Golden and Armstrong) Anyway, looks like the Lakers who are now affiliated with a Pentiction high school are trying to jump on the high school hockey bandwagon that actually works very well in the USA and with some work could revolutionize junior hockey in Canada.

We’ll have more league news as we hear about it plus some Ghostrider news from coach Will Verner in the next week or so.