These days, it is a novelty to watch a hockey game played in the great outdoors. The National Hockey League holds an annual Winter Classic, around New Year’s Day, in which a regular season game takes place outside, a throwback to days past. This year, the good people of Ste. Agathe held their very own Winter Classic. Speaking for myself, I spent New Year’s Day at a friend’s home in the country; their yard is large enough for their very own outdoor rink, and yes, a friendly game broke out.
Like I said, a novelty.
But I can assure you that if the temperature had been ten degrees colder, the wind stronger, and the snow falling heavier, that friendly outdoor hockey game would have quickly been substituted for a friendly indoor board game.
Let’s face facts: hockey may be widely recognized as this country’s favourite pastime, but it has become a relatively safe, entirely indoor sport.
Flash back to the winter of 1958, however, and the same cannot be said. The Niverville Arena was still nine years away, and hockey was played outside on a community rink located behind the current Niverville Credit Union parking lot, the site of a long-gone Gulf service station.
“We had an old shack,” says Bill Redekop, who played right wing on the first Clippers team. When the roads were impassable, players were forced to resort to a more old-fashioned mode of transportation. “There was a barn for horses… I mean, there were storms that the roads were plugged a lot of times. We didn’t drive the car for seven months.”
The Hanover Tache Hockey League (HTHL) started up in the mid-1950s, prompting a number of communities in the southeast region to put teams together.
“I think it was ’57 when they started the league,” says John Koop, who spent years coaching and managing the team. “Niverville wasn’t in it the first year. We got in the second year.”
The way Koop tells it, he and Ron Ginter heard about the league and decided that they were going to get enough people together to form a team. Ginter started out as coach, and Koop served as manager.
Readers may rightly wonder how a team from Niverville, in the middle of the flattest stretch of prairie known to exist, came to be called the Clippers.
“Way back when they original started the Hanover Tache Hockey League and Niverville put a team
in, Clare Enns was one of them,” explains Koop. “They were sitting around, shooting the fat, and Clare Enns was the one that came up with the idea of calling it the Clippers. I don’t know how he came about it, and Clare never played hockey in his life.”
The question of where the logo came from is a little easier to nail down. Koop says, “The ship logo, that came up when we decided to get new uniforms one year. We decided to put a ship on there, and the guy that drew it just used the image from the dime. And that’s basically what it was. Taken right off the dime.”
But long before the team had matching uniforms, official logos, or even a roof over their heads, players like Redekop had to face the elements head-on.
Transportation to the rink was never easy in winter. Even once the players got to the rink, there was a lot to get done before dropping the puck. Players were responsible to show up early and shovel off the ice to get it ready for the game. After each period, the players would scrape the rink again.
“They had a 45-gallon barrel and you filled it with firewood and you fired it up,” says Koop. “Then you’d stand next to it and you’d have to be careful or your clothes would burn and your rear end would be freezing. So you had to make sure you turned.”
Kind of like roasting marshmallows, that.
Freezing cold temperatures and blustery conditions didn’t keep the players away. Same story with the spectators. According to Redekop, upwards of 50 people would show up to watch each game. Because there were no stands, everyone stood in the snow.
“In those days, that was the highlight of the town… I mean, there was nothing else for them except maybe a dance Saturday night,” Redekop says. “They really were cheering us on. I know Mr. Steingart, old John Steingart, he was there every game, and boy, he would let the ref know if he’d made the wrong call!”
The league didn’t pay for ref-erees, at least not in the beginning, so the games were called by which-ever local guys happened to be available. They were volunteers.
“Yeah, they had their hands full," Redekop says, smiling. "Actually, the spectators got a good game. But we weren’t as talented as there are now. We didn’t even have the proper equipment.” Case in point, a lot of guys played without a protective cup. Risk was part of the game. “But we liked the sport. It was fun.”
Redekop’s memories are mostly positive, though he acknowledges that those early days of org-
anized hockey weren’t always very organized. For example, he recalls a game against East Steinbach when the spectators started fighting with the players.
Not that this is Redekop’s biggest highlight from his years on the team. He fondly remembers the first time Niverville made it to the playoffs—in spectacular fashion. “We were playing in Blumenort, and in order to make the playoffs, we had to score 22 goals. This was the last game we played of the [regular] season. And we did it!”
Finding this story a bit hard to believe, I looked for evidence—and sure enough, I found it, in Wes Keating’s book, The Hanover Tache Hockey League Story. That year, Niverville was chasing the last playoff spot, and by scoring 22 goals they were able to rank third in the goals-for-and-against metric, enough to get them in. Niverville was eventually eliminated from the playoffs in a dramatic game against St. Pierre, in overtime, falling 7–6.
Koop remembers that the HTHL was only loosely organized in its early years, before arenas were commonplace. “There was no governing body, no committee, no nothing,” he says. “It was difficult.”
Without a doubt, life got a lot easier with the construction of the Niverville Arena in 1967.
“I was on the community club board when we built the arena. Somehow I got drafted into that,” Koop says of the days after the arena was built but before the artificial plant was installed. “I remember that I started the ice numerous times… I could be out there working all those nights after work, so I could work until late at night flooding the ice, and never a soul would I see. But as soon as there was a patch big enough to maybe skate on, all of a sudden there’d be people there. I don’t know how they figured out that there was ice to skate on.”
In 1980, years of effort paid off when the Clippers won their one and only HTHL championship.
“We beat Mitchell on a Thursday evening,” says Ben Wiebe, who served as secretary-treasurer for the team from 1974 to 1982. “I used to haul chickens for Keystone, and I was supposed to take a load out after supper and I said, ‘No, I’m staying to watch the game.’”
Wiebe looked after the finances, taking care of the books and overseeing 50/50 draws. He and Koop were involved in opening a sports shop at the arena to sell hockey equipment and sharpen skates.
After one particularly successful season, the players decided to rent some ice time during the summer. “I told them, ‘Well, if you do that, I’m not getting involved with it,’” says Koop. “So they rented ice at an arena in the city.”
“At the Maginot Arena,” Wiebe clarifies. His brother-in-law, Roger Chammartin, played for the team and worked there.
The players rented the arena late at night to skate and practice. Koop continues, “They were
skating one night, and a local NHL icon happened upon them and asked whether he could skate with them. Because, you know, there weren’t very many ice surfaces available in summertime. So he wanted to skate and some of our local guys were skating with him—and that was a big thrill.”
The NHL icon’s name? None other than Bobby Hull.
“So I imagine that’s, you know, quite a story,” Koop says. “And it’s probably been embellished as the years go by!”
In many ways, the 1970s represented a golden era for the team.
“The Clippers actually did very, very well financially,” Wiebe says. “When John resigned [in 1980], we had money in the bank.”
But in the years that followed, the sports shop shut down, the players from the championship year gradually moved on, and Wiebe quit. Thus, the Clippers entered a bit of a Dark Ages period.
“For a lot of years, it was pretty dark,” Wiebe agrees. “When I was involved with the Clippers, we had a good team. Especially once the Juniors moved up to Senior, we were very competitive. We didn’t always win, but we were very competitive. After the 1980 championship, players quit, and you can’t blame them. The Hanover Tache League was such that, you had to get up and go to work the next day and you didn’t have insur-ance coverage. If you had a wife and kids to support, you couldn’t afford to get beat up or hurt or break a leg.”
Thirty years later, Niverville no longer has a Senior or Junior Clippers team.
Redekop suggests that one of the reasons the hockey program in Niverville hasn’t flourished in recent years is that kids these days have a lot more things to do. “There’s too many options. When I look at our kids—hockey, volleyball, watching and going to see the Jets, they’re gone three to four days out of the week.”
Indeed, he recognizes that times change. “It’s changing so fast,” Redekop says. “And that’s the same thing with hockey. It’s changed. And now you see these kids, they’ve got equipment which we didn’t even dream of. We were lucky if we got two sticks for Christmas.”
Koop has some mixed feelings about his years with the team. “Toward the end there, I was basically living at the arena, either games or practices or league meetings. So I was spending very little time at home. So I finally had enough of it.”
Koop quit the team in 1980, and he has hardly been back since.
With the possibility of a new arena in Niverville’s future, and a population that booms larger with every passing year, some people in the hockey program hold out hope that the town may one day get a successful farm system in place. A new facility, capable of hosting big tournaments, could help change the fortunes of the Clippers program.
But according to Redekop, even if that happens, it won’t be the same.
“The kids get catered to now,” Redekop says, remembering those early days of anarchic hockey, freezing and shovelling and occasionally fighting with visiting fans. “We had to clean the rink and we accomplished something. We were dead tired and then we went and played hockey. We fought for our game.”
