I’ve been on those road trips.
A snowy highway. A van packed full of kids, hockey gear and parents. Eagerly anticipating the games ahead, and yes, the road-trip highjinks in the hotel, for kids and adults alike.
They’re some of the best memories I have of being a hockey dad.
But there was always that … what if …
Hockey is a cold weather sport, attracting teams from all over the continent to tournaments in cold weather locales. If you live in California and your kid plays high-level travel hockey, you travel, a lot. By air and by land, often in snowy and icy conditions.
During my son’s travels through youth club hockey, then Junior A, then college, we’ve been to countless destinations to watch him play — and sometimes, especially as he got older, he rode on a team bus to go without us. Many of those games were in places where you will see inclement weather, and some warm-weather locales, too: Chicago. Vancouver. Boston. Phoenix (yes, Phoenix. A lot. And Las Vegas, too.) Salt Lake City. Boston. Quebec City. Philadelphia.
And … Colorado.
I’ve been to watch my kid play, at various levels, all over Colorado — including Colorado Springs, Fort Collins and Boulder.
When I heard that members of the Santa Clarita Flyers’ 12AA girls hockey team had been involved in a collision Thursday on Interstate 70 en route to a playoff hockey weekend in Littleton, Colorado, it hit home.
I can envision that Sprinter van from the inside.
And when I heard that several kids had been injured in that collision with a Colorado snowplow that had veered off course — and that the van’s driver, a hockey dad, was killed — that hit home even harder.
I don’t, as of this writing, know the dad’s name. It hasn’t been released and there’s a level of respect and privacy that is afforded to the families and grieving team members before a name is released publicly. I didn’t know him, personally. But I knew “who” he was.
He was a hockey dad, like I was. And my heart broke.
For some reason it reminded me of one of our trips to Colorado Springs for a youth hockey tournament. We didn’t drive on that trip — we flew. The weather was miserable. And we were flying into a snowstorm.
They announced it all over the intercom. Our plane was the last one that had the option before it became mandatory: You can try to land in Colorado Springs or you can divert to Denver, where all of the flights for the rest of the day are going.
We wanted no part of a Denver diversion. We had schedules to keep and that sounded like a recipe for getting stuck in Denver and missing the tournament.
Our pilot was a former military aviator and it was up to her.
As it turned out, she was a bad-ass.
She decided to land in Colorado Springs. We were told to be prepared for a touch-and-go — if things didn’t look right on the runway, she’d pull up and we’d head to Denver. Safety was the priority and if she concluded it wasn’t safe, she’d peel off and take us to Denver instead.
But she landed that sucker. Stuck it right square on that icy runway. Flawlessly. And she got a round of applause from all of the passengers.
We got to Colorado safely and unscathed that day.
Clearly, though, traveling in inclement weather has inherent risks.
In 2018, one team’s travel tragedy started a tradition among “hockey people.” It began after the 2018 Humboldt Broncos bus crash on a snowy Saskatchewan highway that killed 16 members of a Canadian Junior A team.
It came to be known as “sticks out.” Whenever you are expressing camaraderie or love for hockey people who are going through a tough time or mourning a loss, you put your hockey sticks out on your front porch.
At the home rink of the youth Flyers, The Cube in Valencia, they put a couple of sticks out — and someone left flowers with them — in front of the rink on Thursday night.
Sticks out.
Others did the same at their homes, even in other states, in solidarity with those kids and coaches and families whose winter hockey dreams were shattered by a snowplow on I-70.
Late Thursday night, after the Santa Clarita Flyers’ van crash had made headlines all over, we learned the Lady Flyers 12AA players had decided to play this weekend, with a bench shortened not by hockey injuries, but by a tragedy.
I get it. Anyone who has played competitive sports will get it: You confront tragedy by playing through it. All credit goes to those 12-year-old kids for their resolve, win or lose.
Their coach, Todd Stelnick, coached my son more than 15 years ago. Luc was about 13 or 14 years old. I remember Todd and his brother, Eric, who was the assistant coach, as good guys who loved hockey and loved teaching it to kids.
Now, Todd is not only a hockey coach. He’s a hockey dad, too. And more specifically, a girl dad who’s a hockey dad.
Todd has worked to build the girls program at the Flyers club. I can only imagine what this weekend has been like for all of them. I wish Todd and his wife Steffanie well, along with all of the Flyers families, especially the family who lost a dad, and those kids, who confronted the emotions of the moment and decided to forge ahead, and play the game they love.
Thursday night, at our house, we put two hockey sticks out on the front porch.
Sticks out. For the Flyers.
Tim Whyte is the editor of The Signal.
