EVERETT – You’ve just been hired to teach tuba and head the music department at Buzzard’s Breath University, one of your life’s goals.
The job description is that 1) you’ll teach tuba as much as your time will permit. They’ll work it out with you; and 2) as head of the department, you also have to do some recruiting and glad-hand donors. Shouldn’t be overwhelming, the bigwigs say. Should be about half teaching and half the other stuff.
You think about it. You’ve always wanted to teach tuba at BBU. You’ve done it for decades. You’re good at it. Teaching is your love, your passion. The administrative stuff should be tolerable. Just so you get to teach.
So you accept.
Months into the new job you want out. The administrative duties are so demanding that you hardly have time to look at a tuba, much less teach others how to play it.
That’s what Doug Soetaert faced as assistant general manager of the Calgary Flames and general manager of the Omaha Ak-Sar-Ben Knights, the Flames’ new farm team, a job he left the Everett Silvertips for a year ago.
To his surprise and disappointment, the new job was anything but a 50-50 split between hockey operations and administrative duties. It was about 90 percent on the business side.
Soetaert’s assignment: Get the Knights up and running in four months, something that took him a comparatively leisurely 12 months as the Silvertips GM. After the initial set-up, Soetaert reasoned, he would get to spend vast more time in hockey operations.
Love it, he thought.
It didn’t work out that way. Omaha is a tough market, with Nebraska football, Creighton basketball and two other hockey teams in the area. Soetaert found that his time on the hockey end of the deal was all but non-existent.
He lasted a year before he resigned.
“They needed someone there full-time to be in the business, knocking on doors,” he said. “I just felt it wasn’t me. My passion is on the hockey side.”
Doug Soetaert without hockey is Emeril Legasse without linguine. Hockey is what makes Soetaert come to work every day. Has been for four decades as a player, coach and front-office guy.
Soetaert is no more a corporate suit than he is a seamstress. As he showed in his wildly successful two-year stint as the Silvertips’ first general manager, he is immensely skilled at building a hockey team from the ground up. He hired virtually everyone connected with the team, including coach Kevin Constantine and head scout Scott Scoville. His connections and judgment are immeasurable.
Soetaert left the Silvertips as one of the most thriving franchises in the Western Hockey League. He jumped at the chance to do the same with a team with direct connections to the Calgary Flames. Who wouldn’t?
It simply was a bad fit.
Soetaert’s talents, wasted with the Flames, are perfectly suited for the Silvertips. The question was whether owner Bill Yuill wanted to re-introduce Soetaert back into the franchise, in which Constantine, his coaching staff, Scoville and others combined to work the general manager’s duties.
Would Soetaert’s presence upset something that already was working well?
“I think if anybody else would have come back, other than Doug, we’d all be going, ‘Whoaaaa! How’s this gonna work? Are we gonna get along with this guy? Does he think like us?’ ” Constantine said. “We’d be really nervous. But with it being Doug, there are no chemistry issues at all.”
So, on Monday, Soetaert returned to his old job.
The differences in mechanics within the front office will be few in comparison to last season. The vast majority of team decisions were made by committee, with Constantine finally pulling the trigger. The process will be similar group think, only Soetaert will have the final say, as it was his first two years here.
So everybody’s happy. Soetaert’s thrilled to be back and the Silvertips are thrilled to have him back.
What’s to complain about? With Soetaert’s return comes the same vast knowledge of the game and personnel in the U.S., Canada and Europe. The architect of the franchise that shocked the WHL by reaching the league finals in its expansion season, the one who did much to turn Everett into a hockey-mad city, is back at it. The group that started it all in Everett is again complete.
For Silvertips opponents, this has to be a very dark day.
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