Minor Hockey Memories: Justin Bourne

Elite Level Hockey recently asked a number of former professional players to reminisce about their favorite youth hockey memories. Current Sportsnet hockey analyst and former professional player Justin Bourne just wrote a book about hockey called Down and Back and he shared an excerpt about his minor hockey memories.

Growing up in Kelowna’s minor hockey system (more specifically, Westside), I had just played where they put me and enjoyed it, with absolutely zero thoughts of hockey as a potential “career.”

I didn’t play at the top levels of pee wee or bantam (I usually played B rep), and that, combined with being an athletic guy who was more than familiar with the game, meant I tended to score a lot.

Since I was always playing at a level that matched my development, I was always among the top few in goals and points, which contributed to a love for playing. I can’t imagine that struggling to keep up at the highest level you can play without embarrassing yourself is a great time, nor is pining for more ice time.

In my first year of midget hockey, at 15, I got a nice surprise: enough players had given up on the game-as they do at that age-that I made the A rep team, though I assure you it was a numbers thing. I think there was one total cut, two at the most, that first year.

That was my first crack at integrating with the recognizably good players at my high school-those guys who wore their hockey tracksuits to school and for whom Hockey Player was part of their personal identities.

You’d think that would’ve been me, too, given my upbringing, but if I was at all perceived that way, I certainly never felt the part. All that blue and orange and Stanley Cup stuff felt like artifacts of my childhood, not something connected to my own playing.

For someone outside of that group, looking up from the divisions below, the culture felt intimidating the constant ball-busting, the (perceived) unshakable confidence.

When hockey gets accused of not being welcoming, I immediately understand the vibe as something like what I felt then, even though I’m not at all someone the game wouldn’t welcome with open arms. I was fortunate enough to know that when I tried to get in, the initial reaction would be to give me a chance, and I recognize that not everyone gets to start there.

And I learned that, as with exclusive clubs, it’s usually fun once you’re in, but getting in comes with friction for many.

My first-year midget team was unremarkable, aside from the surprise that I still scored at as good a clip as I had in lower leagues.

Something else changed, too. Somewhere within that year, I had one of those growth spurts you hear about a lot from athletes, where I grew like six inches in a year and suddenly my résumé went from “scores a lot” to “scores a lot and is six feet tall at 16 years old” — and apparently scouts liked that combination.

I played well enough and carried myself well enough in that first year of midget to be named captain in year two. (To this day, I’m certain that one of the coaches didn’t want to be seen as picking his own very deserving son, so I’ll give a shout-out to Brad and Brandon Miller for defaulting to me as the next choice.) And boy, oh boy, did we have a year, from the drop of the puck to the end.

We won and won and won, and before you knew it, little Mount Boucherie Arena was packed with high school kids on game nights. We were a deep-scoring team, including from the back end, and it’s there that I laid the foundation of my understanding of the
“start-of-season snowball.”

When a team wins early, players start to believe in one another, and believe in what the coach is saying. It simplifies things when you know you just have to execute the plan, instead of wondering if the plan (or talent) is good enough.

Thinking back to how I felt during the high-stakes games at the end of the season, I can’t believe my heart rate ever came down. In the end, we won the league championship in front of our raucous school friends and parents.

Our terribly bleached-blond group became the first team from our area to win a provincial championship, and I’m not sure there’s a game I played after those tournament games that mattered as much to me on game day as those ones did.

Those championships you win at the minor hockey level are just so different from those at the junior or college or pro level.

There’s a case to be made that they mean more.

The players you win with in minor hockey aren’t just teammates; in many cases, they’re the kids you grew up with. I’ll never forget the tears in the eyes of one of my closest friends, Dave Cunning, before the final game, talking about the chance to win something like that together after so many years playing side by side.

The Stanley Cup is the pinnacle of our sport, the greatest accomplishment a hockey player can put on his résumé, and so, in turn, winning it is a wildly emotional experience for players. It’s everything in our game, right?

But far more people have championships as kids with profound emotional meaning, given what the title meant to them and their friends around them, in that moment.

These people, myself included, feel an attachment those championships as strongly as if they were Stanley Cups, because they mattered then as if they were.

This was my first experience with real hockey success, at least at a meaningful level, that didn’t belong to someone else. While it was the end of the season, it was also the start of something.

We make light of people who won’t let go of big moments from sporting “glory” days of yore, but they matter so much because you only get a crack or two at each respective level on the way up, and once you age out of the hockey system, it’s extremely uncommon to replicate the forging of team bonds with adults the way you do as kids with your teammates.

The endorphin rush is no less significant when you win at the lower levels on your way up. It’s made more meaningful by the fact that, for kids, bigger trophies are still on the table down the road. Beer-league trophies are a cool win, but the success ends there. As a kid winning a title, you’ve won all you are eligible to win … for now. “There could be better ahead” is the positive backdrop of childhood titles.

I scored our first goal in that provincial final, but we were down 2-1 halfway through the third period when two of our defencemen, Travis Parro and Travis Martell, found the back of the net, and we hung on. I put home an empty-netter to cap it off, and at long last Westside took its first-and-still-only province- wide title.

It’s funny. I still often cry when I see the Stanley Cup handed out and players achieve their lifelong dreams. I know how meaningful it is, and I’ve explicitly seen how it can change the lives of those who win it.

Part of the reason I get so happy for guys is that I know that to get there, they’ve had to navigate more than just hockey-there’s politics and luck and the whole business of the game. The wins in minor hockey, while not without the occasional bit of politics along the way, mostly have a greater purity.

That championship remains one of my most meaningful hockey accomplishments, so I’ll give a shout-out to a great group of guys from what’s now West Kelowna.