The three new members inducted into the Thompson sports Wall of Fame at the Vale Regional Community Centre prior to the Norman Northstars alumni game on Feb. 25 during Winterfest are like three intertwined threads in the tapestry of Thompson hockey history, their stories overlapping at various times throughout the decades.
Jack Sangster, who moved to Thompson from Flin Flon in 1961, was part of many important teams in the city’s history, as a player on the first Thompson team to compete out of town and, later, on the senior Thompson Hawks, and then as coach of a provincial championship-winning team in 1974 and of the Manitoba Junior Hockey League King Miners for three years beginning in 1975. He also coached the MJHL Portage Terriers and the Taber Golden Suns of the Alberta Junior Hockey League, as well as the Regina Pats, Seattle Breakers and Brandon Wheat Kings of the Western Hockey League, and was recognized as coach of the year after his first year in Seattle. From 2000 to 2006, he was the coach of the junior B Nelson House Flames in the Northern Manitoba league and later spent time coaching a peewee King Miners team as well as one season as an associate coach of the midget AAA Norman Northstars.
Sangster’s year coaching the Northstars saw him once more alongside fellow inductee Doug Korman, who played for the junior King Miners and the Hawks and was also a player for Sangster in Taber during a hockey career that took him from Thompson to Regina and overseas, both as a Hawks player when the team travelled to Italy and as a player in a German league as well.
Korman also coached termite teams when the league and tournament were run by Keith Kennedy, who was the in charged of the Kinsmen termite league for 25 years. Kennedy came up from Brandon, where he moved in 2000, to be recognized as this year’s other Wall of Fame inductee.
“I joined the Kinsmen Club and the Kinsmen sponsored termites hockey so they wanted one of their members to take it over and I took it over and stuck with it for 25 years,” says Kennedy, who came to Thompson in 1965 with the intention of staying three years and left after 35. “I had a lot of fun doing it, too.”
Kennedy says one of Korman’s brothers was the youngest player he ever coached at three years old and Korman remembers a player who would later become a Northstar back when he was coaching a termite team.
“I remember putting Trent Laycock on the ice and he couldn’t skate,” Korman said. “I had to get out on the ice because he was doing snow angels out on the ice and now he’s going to university, so time flies.”
Sangster played midget hockey when he first came to Thompson and also for a team in the mine league, which sounds like something out of Slap Shot when he describes it.
“That was very scary,” he remembers. “I saw some big guys throw guys right over the boards and right over the snow bank and the fights were unbelievable. The referees couldn’t break them up. I thought somebody was going to get killed out. I was 135 pounds soaking wet at that time.”
Sangster got his own start in coaching while he was playing for the Hawks, helping out with a team to prepare them for a game against a visiting Winnipeg squad and ending up as the main man when the head coach got sick and went into hospital.
Of all his hockey memories, one that sticks out for Sangster is the one that got him onto Good Morning America, when Seattle traded a hockey player for a bus.
“I phoned [the Victoria Cougars general manager] and he just went dead silent,” Sangster recalls. “He said, ‘Jack, this is too big for me. I gotta call the owner.’ Two-and-a-half hours later, he calls me back: ‘We’ll do her.’ It was lots of good press for us. Man, they were calling from all over. It was crazy.”
Korman’s highlights include the Northstars winning the midget league championship and also the atmosphere that teams played in before the C.A. Nesbitt Arena was refurbished.
“I just think the sound was different in the old C.A. arena,” Korman says. “For some reason, it was louder, maybe the seating was different or whatever. There was something about the old C.A., the atmosphere was unreal. There used to be Munn Cups where there was 1,000 people.”
But what he liked most of all was watching players grow.
“They’ve developed into family people with kids and now they’re coaching or volunteering in the community, helping out,” he says. “I think it was all about giving back to the community. I think as long as some of these young guys remember that, it’ll continue. If everybody gives back to the community, if it’s in coaching, reffing, whatever it is, we need people stepping up and helping out for their young kids.”
Kennedy, whose name was on the trophy given to the winning team of the termite tournament championship, said coaching helped him develop some skills that he says he has now put to bed for good.
“I never even hardly got to be much of a skater until I was older and then, of course, termite hockey I did some refereeing with it also, so that’s how my skating more or less got improved,” he said. The last time he got on the skates was three years ago with one of his grandchildren. “We went skating and I put my skates on and from the building to the ice surface was pretty rough and I walked out and my feet went out from under me, flat on my back. I went out onto the rink, skated around a few times and never had my skates on after.”
