Members of the Junior Wranglers Pee Wee AA hockey team take a water break during practice at the Fiesta Rancho SoBe Ice Arena Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2015. The team is heading to Quebec for an international youth hockey tournament. Their first game is on Feb. 15 against Japan.
Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2015 | 2 a.m.
They may be the most unusual youth sports team in Las Vegas.
Fifteen rambunctious boys carving ice with their skates for makeshift snowballs, and slapping hockey pucks off the plexiglass, roughhousing and playing like the 11- and 12-year-olds they are.
And they're also doing well at learning the sport. The Junior Wranglers Pee Wee hockey team this week is headed to Canada, hockey’s homeland, to play in the sport’s equivalent of the Little League World Series. Las Vegas has few opportunities for junior hockey players and there’s a handful of rinks to practice in, but the Wranglers’ players continue to develop at an advanced rate.
Raise your eyebrows all you want, but the youngsters made believers when they played in Fargo, N.D.
The Wranglers traveled there for the Squirt International Hockey Tournament last year, and the home-rink scorekeeper assured the Las Vegas coaches that once they were down by six goals, they would implement a running clock to prevent the other team from running up the score.
Las Vegas won the game, 11-0.
So these boys, their parents and their coaches all think they’ll make Las Vegas proud when they take the ice in Canada.
The challenge now is to raise money to help pay for the trip to the Great White North for the 56th annual Tournoi International de Hockey de Quebec.
The trip will cost upwards of $2,000 per kid after factoring in flight tickets, hotel and living expenses for the 10-night trip. The fundraiser helped with a few hundred dollars, but the rest will come out of the parents’ pockets.
The tournament starts Wednesday and plays through Feb. 22, attracting more than 100 youth hockey teams from 21 countries. Nearly 200 other teams were turned away.
Las Vegas gained access to the tournament through their coach, Eric Lacroix, whose father Pierre was the last general manager of the Quebec Nordiques.
Eric Lacroix played in the NHL from 1992-2001 and worked as the vice president of hockey operations for the Colorado Avalanche before moving to Las Vegas in 2013 when he began coaching the Junior Wranglers.
“I was involved in youth hockey in Denver, and it was a no-brainer to get involved here,” Lacroix said.
The main issue that exists in Las Vegas is the lack of a talent pool when it comes to hockey. According to team manager Rachael Keech, the team had only 50 players in all of Las Vegas to choose their roster from.
Lacroix was born in Quebec, and lived most of his life in hockey-invested areas. Las Vegas doesn’t provide the ideal population for an elite Pee Wee hockey team, but Lacroix has built a winner in the Wranglers.
They won a championship in the Southwest Independent Hockey Cooperation, which encompasses the Southwest United States, and has also won gold medals in the Calgary Pee Wee Cup in Las Vegas and the Grizz Cup in Salt Lake City.
“I’m not telling you they are superstars, but they are pretty good,” Lacroix said. “They work hard and they love the game, and we try to represent ourselves well on and off the ice.”
Still, they’re kids. Parents bend over to help them lace up their skates, and scold them for playing on stacks of rink-divider pads.
One kid slammed on the brakes just as he exited the rink, spraying a wave of ice onto the arena floor. He gathered the shaved ice in his hands, and chucked the makeshift snowball at a teammate — it’s as close to a snowball fight as they’ll get here.
“All 15 of the kids live right here in Las Vegas, so it’s going to be quite an experience going up there,” Lacroix said.
While in Canada the players will stay with families of players from the host city while their parents stay in a separate hotel.
“They’ll be living with kids their age from a different part of the world, and then maybe next door to them are kids from Japan or California, so it’s pretty cool,” Lacroix said. “It’s a great experience to learn the culture and the language.”
It’s a culture with deep roots in hockey lore. The Great One, Wayne Gretzky himself, participated in this tournament as a kid in 1974.
Canada, and the rest of the world, will be introduced to the Junior Wranglers when they take on Japan in their first contest of the tournament Feb. 15.
The game will be played in the Quebec Pepsi Coliseum, a 15,000-seat arena, and will be nationally televised on TSN in Canada.
“It’s quite an event,” Lacroix said. “At the end of the day, hockey brings so much to the kids. I’m a little biased, but hockey is the greatest thing in the world.”
To donate to the team, contact team President Matthew Edlin at [email protected].
Jesse Granger is a UNLV journalism student.
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