It was their patience on and off the ice that paved the way for the Delta Ice Hawks to win their third Pacific International Junior Hockey League championship in franchise history.
The veteran team completed its impressive PIJHL playoff run with a 4-3 game six victory over the Abbotsford Pilots. After some well-deserved days off, the Hawks now begin preparations for the Cyclone Taylor Cup junior "B" provincial championships which gets underway April 12 in Abbotsford.
Delta will be battling champions from the Kootenay (Beaver Valley) and Vancouver Island (Victoria) leagues, along with the host Pilots to determine which team will represent B.C. at the Keystone Cup Western Canadian Championships in Saskatchewan.
"This is a huge accomplishment and a great feeling for our owners right down to our game day volunteers," said Ice Hawks general manager Peter Zerbinos. "We all couldn't be any prouder of what are players have gone out and accomplished so far."
The ground work for Friday's clinching win began in earnest two years earlier when a sub .500 regular season Ice Hawks team made a surprising run to the PIJHL final and lost to Aldergrove in six games.
It was a performance that secured goaltender Andrew Hunt's spot in the B.C. Hockey League and surely many more of his 17-and-18-year-old teammates would follow.
Zerbinos was so certain he was facing an extensive rebuilding job that his decision on a new head coach was based on bringing in someone who worked well with young players.
However, to his surprise and others too, players started to trickle back, passing on the option to play junior "A" elsewhere to stay in the Lower Mainland with the Ice Hawks. Zerbinos suddenly found himself in scramble mode, trading or releasing players to get under the roster limit and finding an experienced head coach who would be a better fit. That turned out to be Dave McLellan who was fresh off a successful run in the BCHL with Burnaby.
"It's a testament to the organization that these players wanted to come back and play for us," said Zerbinos. "It definitely did change things."
The Ice Hawks finished the 2010-11 regular season with a sparkling 34-9-3 record. Still, it was only good enough for second place in their division behind the Richmond Sockeyes. Delta also came up short in the playoffs against its cross-river rival, falling in the seventh game of the conference final.
Would the Ice Hawks stick with the same core of players for another run or go a different direction, especially after watching the Sockeyes enjoy so much success with some significant turnover to their roster?
"It was a tough and calculated decision. We really were at a crossroad," recalled McLellan.
"Do you go young and revamp things or try again with this group?"
"What made us go the way we did was we felt our players learned a lot from the Richmond (series) loss. We felt that would stick in the back of their minds and they would take it into this season. Really, all year was about getting ready for a seven game series against Richmond."
One of the big adjustments was the Ice Hawks shying away from their run and gun style and getting more comfortable playing with patience in tight hockey games. They also did some tinkering to the line-up, adding local product Grange Gordon in a trade with Grandview and Ryan Stewart, a physical 20-year-old forward from Abbotsford.
The Hawks still received a huge first round scare from the North Delta Devils, falling behind 3-1 in the series, before storming back to advance. The momentum carried over to the highly-anticipated series with the Sockeyes with Delta winning in six, thanks to impressive road victories in games four and five.
"We showed a lot of character in that North Delta series to battle back the way we did," said McLellan. "That really set us up well in knowing what we had to do against Richmond."
Twenty-year-olds Spencer Traher and Cody Fidgett led the Ice Hawks in scoring during the regular season and playoffs respectively, while it was only fitting another key player during this three-year journey - captain Cody Smith - notched the series clinching goal Friday.
"We believed in our 20-yearolds and they showed us why," added Zerbinos. "I have always looked at it like it's a piece a fabric. One player is a thread and if you lose him then it could all fall apart. We didn't want that to happen."
