It’ s a new hockey season, and the Portage College Voyaguers have themselves a new coach and even a new logo on the front of their jerseys as the team is looking for a new start this year.
It’ s a new hockey season, and the Portage College Voyaguers have themselves a new coach and even a new logo on the front of their jerseys as the team is looking for a new start this year.
The college and new head coach Nate Bedford are looking for a clean slate following last year’ s less than impressive season that saw the men’ s hockey team win only four of their 28 games, resulting in a last place finish.
The year also saw the release of the team’ s head coach Arnie Caplan shortly before the end of the season.
The college’ s Manager of Recreation and Athletics Jim Knight filled the role for the last few games of the 2016-17 season before Bedford was named head coach back in June. Bedford looks to put the Voyageurs’ past season behind them and get a fresh start.
“I think that it’ s always good to start fresh,” he said. “It’ s what we’ re trying to do here and start from scratch and not focus on what didn’ t go well last year.”
Bedford has plenty of experience coaching ACAC hockey, acting as coach of the Keyano Huskies men’ s hockey team from 2014 to 2016 before the team was discontinued.
After leaving the Huskies, he took the position of head coach of the Battleford North Stars in the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League (SJHL) where he found considerable success.
“When I coached Battleford in Saskatchewan we had the best goals-against [differential] in Canada,” he said. “There’ s no reason in the world our goals-against needs to drop drastically from what I had there.”
Over the course of the season, his team allowed only 103 goals against with a 48-9-1 regular season record, before going 12 -0 with only 25 goals against in the playoffs to win the SJHL Canalta Cup League Championship trophy.
The Voyageurs meanwhile finished last season with 149 goals against - nearly double their goals scored - with a regular season record of 4-23-1, failing to qualify for a playoff spot.
It is the team’ s goals against record that Bedford plans to focus on improving this season.
“The main thing will be about bringing down our goals-against, which was atrocious last year,” he said.
Knight is optimistic that Voyageurs fans will see an improvement on the ice this year and feels Bedford has put together a strong team.
“I’ ve had the opportunity to work with him here for two-and-a-half months,” said Knight. “He’ s put together a really good team from across Canada. I’ m really excited to see what we can do this year.”
Knight is hopeful the team will be able to make the playoffs this year and thinks increasing team discipline will be able to make a much-needed difference.
“I’ d really like us to get a playoff spot, we’ ve only made the playoffs once in the past four years,” he said. “We have to start building our team up as a contender who can do some damage in the league. We need to be more disciplined as well, we can’ t be hurting ourselves by getting all kinds of penalties.”
The Voyageurs lead the league last season in penalty minutes, something that resulted in a lot of power play goals for their opponents. But while the team hopes to decrease the amount of time they spend in the box, Knight says they plan to increase the amount of time they spend helping in the community.
“We’ re hoping to expand on our 700 hours of community service from last year,” he said.
Also new for the team this year is a redesigned logo college officials describe as featuring a more “lifelike and determined” Eddy Rocks - the college’ s mascot - placed atop a red, white and blue “V.”
The jerseys will also have a different colour scheme from the previous green, white and blue, and all of the college’ s athletic programs will be showcasing the new look and logo.
Knight said that in the spirit of the college celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, the team’ s logo needed to be updated as it was created back in the 1990s.
“Our past logo has been good but as we enter the college’ s next 50 years we wanted it to resemble Eddy Rocks,” he said. “This new logo shows Eddy propelling his canoe with aggression, determination and purpose, something which captures the spirit of our athletes.”
The Voyageurs will be debuting their jerseys on home ice at the Bold Center during their first exhibition game this Saturday night at 7 p.m. against the University of Alberta-Augustana Vikings.
Their first regular season game of the year is not until Oct. 6 out of town against Briercrest College, meanwhile their first regular season game at home will be Oct. 13 against the Grant MacEwan University Griffons.
