‘You need a hero every game now’

The Niverville Nighthawks don’t look like many other Manitoba Junior Hockey League franchises.

The team does not employ a combined head coach and general manager, as is the case for nearly every other squad. They have head coach Dwight Hirst and general manager Mike McAulay.

Niverville joined the MJHL in 2022 with Kelvin Cech in a combined role and McAulay as assistant general manager. After parting ways with Cech in the middle of the 2023-24 season, they turned to Hirst, who is from Lac du Bonnet, as interim coach and promoted MacAulay to general manager, maintaining that structure ever since.

It paid off this year with a league championship and one of the strongest MJHL representatives in recent years at the national junior A championships. The Nighthawks went undefeated in preliminary round play at the Centennial Cup in Summerside, P.E.I., earning a bye to the semifinals.

Hirst said they are in complete alignment, working together to ensure they had a light schedule early on so coaches could install a deeper game plan and structure across the team.

“A lot of people now when they see the Nighthawks logo or see us play, they know what our identity is,” Hirst said. “For us to have an identity you’ve got to find players that can play within that system.”

The Selkirk Steelers are the other MJHL team that doesn’t use a head coach/general manager combo, but head coach Hudson Friesen serves as director of hockey operations, with no GM listed on the team’s website.

“It’s an interesting structure. There’s pros and cons,” McAulay said during the team’s off-day at the Centennial Cup.

“The respect that I have for Dwight and Dwight has for me, it just works really well. We’re not a couple of yes-men. There’s some hard conversations behind closed doors about players but ultimately there’s just such a respect for each other that we get to where we need to get to.”

Team president Clarence Braun said separating the roles wasn’t by design.

“The fortunate thing for us is both (Hirst) and (McAulay) are independently well-off, in terms of they have their own lives, they have their own businesses,” Braun said. “He didn’t need to be the guy making $80,000 or $100,000 a year. We kind of fell into it.”

The Nighthawks have worked hard to carry themselves as a top MJHL team with high expectations.

“That starts with the board of directors and the people that came in and founded this team and put their hard-earned money into it to get it off the ground,” McAulay said.

“We have such a terrific volunteer base as well. They just want to be a part of it. They’re really selfless and they give a lot to our organization.”

McAulay has put together a deep roster for Hirst to coach, chalk full of quality Manitoba talent. He said the decision from top-end players to return to Niverville despite opportunities to play elsewhere sparked the 2026 run.

“They had one thing in their mind when we got eliminated by Winkler in the first round (last year) and that was that taste they couldn’t get out of their mouths all summer,” MacAulay said.

“We went through that series with Winkler and watched the champion emerge from the Manitoba league, we felt we needed to get some pace and we needed to get some more tenacity in our forward group.”

The team added three players with championship experience to help vault them to contender status, including a mid-season trade for Marlen Edwards, who was a difference-maker when they came out sluggish in their opening game of the Centennial Cup.

Edwards scored twice including the overtime winner as the rest of the team caught up to the pace against the host Summerside Western Capitals after a couple weeks off.

“You need a hero every game now,” McAulay said.

It has been a roster reversal from the first few years. Without an expansion draft, Niverville had to rely heavily on American and out of province talent the first couple seasons.

Braun said they had three players from Manitoba on the permanent roster in the first season. This year they were one of the most Manitoba-heavy teams in the MJHL playoffs, including four players from the Eastman region.

“Mike’s intentionally built it this way,” Braun said. “We think Manitoba players can compete and do well, and we’re excited to be here representing the MJHL with 14 Manitobans.”

Braun is still shocked he’s in Summerside, watching a team he helped found four years ago play at a national championship.

“I’m not sure it’s even hit me yet,” he said. “I remember the game in Virden at the Turnbull Cup I’m sitting there after the final whistle, and you’ve won it. It’s kind of like, wow… The guys have just shown up game after game after game all year.”

Braun said he began to think they had true championship potential right before Christmas and added that despite winning the Turnbull Cup, they came to the national championship with a sense of “unfinished business.”

Manitoba has won the Centennial Cup three times, with the Portage Terriers and Selkirk Steelers claiming titles in the 1970s, and the Terriers winning a second as host in 2014.

Niverville will face Ontario representative the Toronto Patriots in one semifinal, with puck drop at 2 p.m. CT. Summerside meets the Quebec junior league’s Collège Français de Longueuil in the other.

— Carillon