BY Jonathan Huntington
SASKATOON – The cost of a good hockey stick is between $440-$480 these days – so, imagine losing the stick bag for your entire team!
That’s the situation the Notre Dame Hounds in the SMAAAHL faced this week after returning from a U18AAA tournament in Halifax on Monday.
For more than 48 hours, the team’s stick bag – with 35 to 50 sticks – was missing somewhere in Canada.
“When we landed in Regina (on Monday afternoon) it was the only bag that didn’t come,” said Notre Dame head coach Casey O’Brien. “I called WestJet and said: ‘That’s a pretty expensive stick bag (that is missing).'”
Based on simple math, an estimated $18,000 in hockey sticks were missing. But to the credit of everyone involved, patience and calmness paid off late Wednesday afternoon when the sticks arrived on campus in Wilcox – about 24 hours in advance of today’s road game against Yorkton.
“Some things are out of our control and everybody was patient,” continued O’Brien. “The people on the phone at WestJet were awesome. We were very fortunate (the sticks were found).”
