Dean Clark didn’t believe he was wall of fame material when the invitation arrived to attend Monday’s ceremony honouring St. Albert’s skating elite.
“I was thinking that maybe they were scraping the barrel to include me,” said the former Alberta Junior Hockey League championship winner with the St. Albert Saints as a player and head coach. “It’s a real honour. I’m speechless almost. There are some great players on that wall and I guess I don’t think of myself like that.”
The 47-year-old was excited to see that Nick Holden, the son of Clark’s former teammate, John Holden, was among the initial 24 skaters on the wall of fame inside Performance Arena.
“I know John really well. We played together a little bit in minor hockey and to see his son involved is pretty cool,” said Clark, who is entering his third season as head coach of the Prince George Cougars.
The timing of the wall of fame unveiling coincided with last weekend’s Western Hockey League pre-season tournament involving the Cougars at Servus Credit Union Place.
“St. Albert has always been the start of everything for me so it’s always good to come back,” Clark said. “I’m proud to be from St. Albert. It was just a good community for myself. I meet a lot of good people and there were a lot of good hockey players I played with too.”
Clark was drafted by the Edmonton Oilers in the eighth round, 167th overall, of the 1982 NHL entry draft.
“I got to play my only game in the NHL in Edmonton [in 1983/84]. A lot of people in town saw that game and my mom and dad did too.”
After playing his rep hockey in St. Albert, Clark patrolled the blueline for the Saints before going on to play for Ferris State University, Kamloops in the WHL, the Alberta Golden Bears and NAIT Ooks.
In Kamloops, he won a WHL championship with the Junior Oilers in 1984 and in 129 career games, scored 50 goals and added 88 assists.
“The biggest thing was having the Saints come to St. Albert and I was able to play junior hockey at home for a couple of years before I moved on. It was certainly great to do that,” Clark said. “And then to be able to go through the Saints again to get my coaching career started was great. We had a couple of championships when I was playing for the Saints and then [14 years later] I won one as a coach and that kind of kicked off my Western Hockey League career.
“I’m proud of the fact that I was able to come back and help out the Saints and get them kind of going again so they could get some more championships.”
With Clark behind the bench, the Saints beat the Fort McMurray Oil Barons in an epic seven-game thriller in the AJHL final, then lost a grueling seven-game Doyle Cup pacific region series against the Vernon Vipers, the eventual tier II national champions.
“In the Doyle Cup, we should’ve played our games in Akinsdale, which was our rink. We played in the Agricom and we were down 2-1 going into Vernon. We kind of took our home advantage away because Akinsdale was a nice little rink to play in for our team. We still came back and battled hard and we ended up going into a game seven, but couldn’t quite get it done,” Clark said of the 1996 Saints that featured Dan Bokenfohr, the team’s all-time career scoring leader, and future NHLers Fernando Pisani and Steve Reinprecht.
Clark, the Canadian Hockey League’s coach of the year in 1998 with the Calgary Hitmen, fell one goal short in overtime of winning the 1999 Memorial Cup final against the Ottawa 67s.
“That’s a tougher game to get to than probably even the Stanley Cup. An overtime goal like that [by Mike Zultek] was tough. That’s part of the game, but we had a real good year.”
Clark has won more than 400 games in the WHL with the Hitmen (1996-2001), Brandon Wheat Kings (2001-03), Kamloops Blazers (2003-07) and the Cougars.
“I’ve been fortunate enough to go to world juniors [as an assistant coach in 2000] and do some different things like that. I’ve met Bobby Orr, my hero, and he is a good friend of mine now. A lot of good things happened to me from being part of the game, especially coming from St. Albert.”
