Senior AA hockey is returning to Morinville.
The newly crowned Morinville Kings will skate in the North Central Hockey League this season after their application was approved last month.
Players from the Morinville Jets, a cornerstone of the community for 35 years, will now have the opportunity to continue playing competitive hockey with the Kings, who will wear the same silver and black colours and somewhat the same logo as the NHL team in Los Angeles.
“There was nowhere for them to really go and a lot of guys still wanted to play more hockey so that was definitely the driving force behind us approaching the league,” said head coach Wayne Gatza.
The process to bring senior hockey back to Morinville after an absence of more than 20 years started in February and was finalized at the NCHL’s annual meeting May 4.
“We had some players finishing up their junior B and junior A hockey careers and they approached me about getting a senior team together so I approached the Town of Morinville to see if they would be interested in having a senior AA team play out of the (Ray McDonald Sports Centre) arena. They were very ecstatic about that so then I contacted the league and the league was really excited that we were going to make an application,” Gatza said. “We had to prepare what it was going to cost to run the team, what we needed for the team and make sure we had a board in place to help and then we had to wait until May to get the official yes, you’re accepted into the league.”
The NCHL was established in 1994 and is sanctioned with Hockey Alberta. The league champion participates at provincials against the champions from the other senior AA leagues in Alberta.
The NCHL also added the Westlock Warriors and Whitecourt Wild into the fold and the Slave Lake Winterhawks return after a one-year absence.
The Kings will play in the north division with the Athabasca Aces, Westlock, Slave Lake and the league champion Devon Barons.
The south division features the Drayton Valley Wildcats, Edson Ice, Hinton Heat, Rocky Mountain House Rams and Whitecourt.
Teams will play each team twice and the top four in each division make the playoffs.
Last season the league consisted of six teams and an 18-game schedule.
“It made geographic sense to have a team out of our area so the league was very happy to get us,” Gatza said.
A six-person board of directors will oversea the Kings and the paperwork has started for the team to be incorporated as a not-for-profit society.
The Town of Morinville also gave its stamp of approval on game and ice allocation for the Kings for the upcoming season.
Securing sponsorship, attracting players to the tryout camp in mid-September and finding an equipment manager and trainer remain high on the Kings’ priority list.
“There is still a lot more stuff to happen to make this go really smooth but I think we’re moving in the right direction and we’re very happy about that,” said Gatza, who also serves as the Kings’ president.
The response from prospective players has been positive.
"We're going to have a pretty good mix. Originally I thought we were going to be very young but in the last couple of weeks the phone has started to ring from players asking us when are tryouts and what do we have to do to come out and play,” Gatza said. “We have couple of ex-Jets who played senior hockey before and were playing beer league and they want to come back and play competitive. We also have some St. Albert connection as well to the team (including netminder Curtis Ronaldson, a former junior B St. Albert Merchant), which is very important to us. We want to make sure we’re all local players.”
For more information about the Kings, contact Gatza at [email protected] or vice president Brian Reiger at [email protected].
The team’s website is www.morinvillekings.com and the league’s website is www.northcentralhockeyleague.com.
