EVERETT – Ah, California. The sunshine state. Home of the O.C., beautiful beaches, palm trees …
… and ice hockey?
Excuse me?
The search for hockey’s hottest hotbeds doesn’t often lead one to a location where that hotbed tends to melt the surface.
Elizabeth Armstrong / The Herald
Where ice is blended into cocktails, not used as an after-school playground.
Where more climate-friendly sports such as baseball and basketball flourish, while hockey is relegated to paved parking lots and played on in-line skates.
And yet, the Western Hockey League finds itself under siege by an invasion from the south.
California players in the WHL have traditionally been as numerous as snowy days in San Diego. In the rare situation where a Californian did pop up on a roster, they tended to be as much a curiosity as a contributor. Last season a total of just six Californian players dotted WHL rosters.
This season that total has more than doubled.
The primary reason is one team based out of the Los Angeles suburb of Lakewood.
And the Everett Silvertips have been one of the biggest beneficiaries.
The Team
The first time Jonathan Milhouse practiced with the Silvertips, before he had even committed to the team, he put in a healthy dose of overtime.
No, Milhouse wasn’t trying to curry favor with the coaches. Following practice, he and Shane Harper grabbed a puck and played one-on-one keepaway for about an hour.
The smiles and banter as they continually attempted to stick handle past one another – and their clear knowledge of each other’s favorite moves – made one fact clear:
These guys have played together for a while.
Indeed, it’s a group who grew up playing together, of which Harper and Milhouse are a part, who make up the bulk of the California invasion.
The California Wave’s 2004-05 AAA Midget team put seven players into the WHL this season as 1989-born rookies. In addition to Harper and Milhouse, they include forwards C.J. Stretch (Kamloops), Colin Long (Kelowna), Ryan Letts (Calgary), Matt Sokol (Medicine Hat) and defenseman Jonathan Blum (Vancouver).
That’s more players than California has ever sent to the WHL in one season.
That’s more players than any American midget team has ever sent to the WHL in one season.
It’s even more 16-year-olds than top Canadian midget teams send to the WHL in one season.
“I have so much pride for all my buddies and me,” Harper said. “Canadians say, ‘You play hockey down in California?’ That’s what I love. They don’t expect anything of you, so it’s cool to prove we can play hockey.”
The Wave program has produced other prominent players – 1987-born goaltender Joey Perricone (Moose Jaw), 1988-born defenseman Cameron Cepek (Portland) and 1988-born goaltender Tommy Tartaglione (Vancouver) are currently playing in the WHL.
And 88-born forward Rhett Rakhshani is playing for the U.S. National Team Development Program’s U-18 team.
But the 1989 class is special.
The 89 team twice finished as national runners up. It finished second at the USA Hockey Tier I Bantam AAA tournament in 2004. A year later the Wave placed second at the Tier I 16-Under Midget AAA tournament, despite a roster that was on average nearly a full year younger than all its opponents. The Wave also won the prestigious Kamloops International Bantam Ice Hockey Tournament, perhaps the top Bantam tournament in western North America, in 2004.
“Their skill level was great,” Silvertips director or player personnel Scott Scoville said. “The California Wave was for a couple of years the best Bantam team in North America.”
So how is it that a team based in such sunny climes spawned one of the most prolific crops of rookies ever seen in the WHL?
The Coach
Jack Bowkus was the right man at the right time.
Nine years ago, along with Jeff Turcotte, Bowkus helped form the California Wave with the intention of developing top-level youth hockey in the Los Angeles area.
The creation of the Wave gave players in southern California a top club to play for. In the past, top talents from California tended to relocate to the Midwest at an early age to develop their abilities. The highest-profile example from recent years is forward Bobby Ryan, who moved from Anaheim to Detroit and was selected second overall by the Anaheim Mighty Ducks in the 2005 NHL Draft. The founding of the Wave gave players a viable local option.
The club’s creation also coincided with the Gretzky revolution. Wayne Gretzky, considered the greatest hockey player of all time, was traded to the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings in 1988, and his time in Los Angeles began an explosion of hockey interest in the area. The Wave were formed just when the players influenced by Gretzky were reaching the age for club hockey.
“Gretzky was the reason I started playing hockey,” said Long, echoing the sentiments of his former teammates. “Then when I was a kid in ‘93, he was probably why I started getting serious.”
Those players also arrived with advanced stick skills. With ice availability scarce and expensive, many California players grow up playing roller hockey, a four-on-four game that emphasizes skill over strength.
So when Bowkus became the full-time head coach of the California Wave’s 89s in 2002, he had plenty to work with.
“It was a fantastic group of kids to work with,” Bowkus said. “They had a tremendous commitment to the game, they were willing to learn and they worked hard.”
And most importantly in the context of this story, Bowkus is a WHL alumnus himself.
Bowkus, a Detroit native, was one of the few players to leave the Midwest in favor of the WHL. He spent four seasons as a forward with the Saskatoon Blades from 1984-88, scoring 100 points in his final season.
So he was acutely aware of everything the WHL had to offer.
The WHL was a virtual unknown in California, but Bowkus made sure his players were exposed to the league. In addition to the Kamloops tournament, the Wave played in tournaments in Chilliwack, British Columbia, Medicine Hat, Alberta, and Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, where the players were seen by WHL scouts and got an idea of what hockey in Canada is all about.
They also won a lot of games.
“Other teams would think, ‘How are we going to lose to a California team,’ ” Harper recalled. “On the ice we’d get the surfer comments, how we should go surf. Then we’d end up beating them.”
And the WHL took notice.
The Example
Ray Macias is a trail blazer.
No, the Long Beach native wasn’t the first Californian to play in the WHL. When he arrived in Kamloops along with his buddy, Nathan Grochmal, in 2003, Jason Beeman was already established in Tri-City. And Medicine Hat’s Ryan Hollweg, who was originally from California but moved to Langley, B.C., during his youth, was a budding star.
But Macias may be the most important.
“I didn’t know what the WHL was until I came up here,” Macias said. “I basically found out about it the first time (Kamloops) listed me before my first training camp when I was 16. I came up here and saw what it was all about and I loved it, so that’s why I chose to come here.”
Macias had more success than any other player who went straight from California to the WHL. He was an immediate contributor, playing in 69 games as a rookie and scoring 12 goals from his defensive position. He was selected for the 2005 Canadian Hockey League Top Prospect’s Game.
Macias’ experience in the WHL reverberated through the L.A. basin, in part because his mother, Helen Alex, as one of the managers of the L.A. Junior Kings, is a prominent member of the local hockey community.
Then in 2005 came the key moment:
Macias was selected in the fourth round of the NHL Draft by the Colorado Avalanche.
That was an eye-opener.
“Ray comes up here and then gets drafted and that was like, ‘Wow!’ ” Harper said.
“It made me think, ‘Maybe I can do that,’ ” Milhouse added.
The Decision
The 2004 WHL Bantam Draft was a banner day for the California Wave.
Four players from the team were drafted – Sokol in the second round, Stretch in the fourth, Blum in the seventh and Long in the 11th.
Milhouse, Harper and Letts later received invitations to attend WHL training camps, Harper’s invitation coming from Kamloops.
All of them left impressions in their first training camps. Now they had a decision to make. Signing a WHL contract means forfeiting one’s NCAA eligibility. So would the players choose the WHL or college?
“It’s so hard to make this type of a decision as a child of 16,” said Dr. Craig Milhouse, Jonathan’s father.
Both routes had their advantages. The WHL offered the closest replication of the NHL, with its physical style of play and 72-game schedule, and was viewed as the quickest route to the NHL. College offered hockey and education in one package and a style of play that better suited the Wave’s players, who aside from Letts are all smaller but skilled players.
“You just have to make up your mind on what you’re going to do, what best suits you as a person,” Milhouse said. “You have to look deep and figure out what you want to do.”
A major factor in the decision-making process was the lack of respect for California hockey in the U.S. system. California is barely on the map when it comes to the national hockey scene. Both the U.S. National Team Development Program and top colleges focus their recruiting on players from Michigan, Minnesota and Massachusetts. Rakhshani is the only Californian on either the U-17 or U-18 national teams this season. Despite the Wave’s success, Blum was the only player from the team offered a spot in the NTDP this year.
And Blum was the first to commit to the WHL.
” (The NTDP) had a spot for me,” said Blum, who signed with the Giants immediately following his 15-year-old training camp. “But the way they’re run, there’s a lot of politics involved. They’ve lost a lot of players to the WHL because they really don’t look west of the Rockies.”
Blum’s decision began a cascade of players choosing the WHL. Long was the second to commit, then one-by-one, all of the Wave’s top players chose the WHL over college, culminating in Milhouse’s decision in November.
Everett’s location in the U.S. made the decision easier for Harper, Milhouse and their families.
“First, it’s geographically closer, so it’s an easier ride for Shane to visit us or us to visit Shane,” Mike Harper, Shane’s father, said. “Also, there’s more simplicity. You don’t have to pull out your passport or birth certificate, you don’t have to change your money, those kind of things. Then educationally it’s easier for him to come back at the end of the season from a U.S. high school than from a Canadian high school.”
As a result Harper, who had already committed to playing for the L.A. Junior Kings before even arriving at the Silvertips training camp, had an easier time changing his mind – and making Everett a part of the invasion.
The Future
The influx of California players into the WHL this season doesn’t necessarily mean the floodgates have been opened.
When Gretzky was traded to St. Louis in 1996, it heralded the end of the golden age of Los Angeles hockey. The 1989s were 7 years old, and the younger players had little if any influence from the Great One.
The Wave program also isn’t what it once was. Both Bowkus and Turcotte left the program this season, with Bowkus now an assistant coach for the United States Hockey League’s Indiana Ice and Turcotte moving to Team L.A., where’s he’s coaching younger players. The Wave’s 1990 class is considered the last of its impact teams.
“There’s probably a lot more roller hockey players who have gotten into ice now, but you could say there’s not as much talent as our age group has,” Milhouse said. “It certainly doesn’t help that the two best coaches in California aren’t with the Wave any more.”
But the 89 class has put California firmly on the WHL’s radar.
Teams now spend more time scouting California teams, and Californian Mitch Wahl was selected fourth overall by Spokane in the 2005 Bantam Draft.
The WHL is also much more visible in California than it was three years ago. Players who have had success in the WHL, such as Macias and Vancouver forward Tim Kraus, are constantly questioned about their experiences when they return home during the offseason. The 89s can expect the same when they go back to California after their rookie seasons.
So while there may never be another team that puts seven 16-year olds into the WHL, California is here to stay.
And it’s likely the class of 1989 will be known as the pioneers.
“I’d like to think that,” Harper said.
Added Milhouse: “That’s a good way to put it.”
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