Brandon rallies around stranded team

BRANDON — While the Medicine Hat Tigers and Brandon Wheat Kings battled on the ice on Wednesday evening, the real drama was taking place behind the scenes as one Western Hockey League club came to the aid of another.

During the game, Medicine Hat’s bus driver suffered a medical emergency at a coffee shop on the Trans-Canada Highway and was taken to hospital by ambulance. That left the Tigers, who were in the midst of earning a 6-3 victory, with a locked bus that was running and no way to get the vehicle to the rink and no rooms to stay in that night.

Mike Filipchuk, who is Brandon’s vice-president of business operations, swung into action with the help of several other people.

“My thought was that Medicine Hat doesn’t know anybody here,” Filipchuk said. “We have all the contacts. We have the bus companies, we have the restaurants, we have the hotels, we know who to call and who to talk to.

The situation came to Filipchuk’s attention midway through the second period after the Brandon Police Service contacted the Keystone Centre. A maintenance worker spoke to an officer and got his number.

By chance, Filipchuk was nearby and called the officer, who explained the situation to him, although he couldn’t share all the medical details.

Filipchuk went to the bench with a couple members of the Keystone Centre’s security team and spoke to athletic therapist and equipment manager Mikki Lanuk.

After letting the team know, his next thought was getting in touch with the driver’s family.

“At that point, I’m thinking hopefully he’s being taken care of by our medical staff in Brandon and hopefully it was going to turn out, which it didn’t,” Filipchuk said of the driver, who later died. “From that point, it was ‘Somebody is going to the hospital, the Tigers are stranded here, how I can help them to make sure this is not a more stressful situation?’”

During the second intermission, Filipchuk spoke to the Medicine Hat coaching staff and a Tigers assistant coach checked with CanadInns to check if they had rooms available. The team ended up staying in the hotel.

Clubs traditionally pre-order their post-game meals to eat on the bus, so that was taken care of, but Filipchuk thought about finding another charter bus to get them home.

The status of the Tigers bus was a slightly more vexing issue, because it was locked and running. Filipchuk quickly reached out to former Wheat Kings coach David Anning, who owns and operates Brandon-based Compass Coach Lines with his wife Jenn.

“As soon as I called him he was instantly ‘How can I help?’ What can I do?” Filipchuk said.

Anning, who coached in the league from 2012 to 2019 and started Compass Coach Lines in 2020, said the call was difficult in a couple of ways.

“From a hockey perspective, your driver typically spends a lot of time with you on the road. You typically have the same driver for most trips so you really get to know that person and they become part of the team. It would hit hard for the staff for sure, for the majority of the players, it would be very, very difficult news to receive.”

Traxx Coachlines, which operates the Tigers bus, ended up contacting Anning directly.

The Compass fleet was tied up in Thompson at the Manitoba Winter Games, but they did have a driver available to lend a hand. He went to the coffee shop, and after a local towing company popped the lock, drove the bus to the Keystone Centre.

The bus drove to door 16 at the Keystone, the players ran out to grab what they needed and then the vehicle, which couldn’t be locked, was stored indoors in an open bay at Compass.

Meanwhile, Brandon equipment manager Jake McKercher grabbed Medicine Hat’s laundry and washed their socks and game jerseys, and the Tigers were able to leave their equipment and sticks in the visitors dressing room overnight.

“It was just little things you wouldn’t think of or normally have to do when a team is leaving,” Filipchuk said, noting the Keystone Centre continued to help out as needed.

The Annings picked up the new driver at the Brandon airport after he arrived on Thursday afternoon, and took him to the bus at Compass. It arrived at the Keystone Centre around 1:45 p.m., and the team departed on the 830-kilometre trip around 2 p.m.

Filipchuk, who is quick to deflect credit to all the others who helped out on Wednesday evening, said hockey is ultimately a very small world.

“It was just something I thought we needed to help with,” Filipchuk said. “If that happened to us, I would hope other teams would jump in and do the same thing.”

— Brandon Sun