fbpx

Wolverines in the Hunt

Whitefish junior hockey team chasing playoffs in first season

By Dillon Tabish

Holding your own in the Western States Hockey League can be rough. Just ask 20-year-old Chris Cutshall.

The 5-foot-8 forward on the Whitefish Wolverines junior hockey team boasts a wide smile with a top row of false teeth and a missing gap front and center.

“They’ve been knocked out multiple times. The center one is still missing,” he says.

Cutshall and the Wolverines have taken their lumps in the inaugural season of the upstart local program but that hasn’t stopped them from competing for a playoff berth, which would be an impressive achievement for a new club in the oldest junior league on the West Coast.

The first-year program, featuring a roster of players 20 and under from across the continent and even Russia, is in fourth place in the division standings at 12-21-1 overall. The season is down to the final month with a dozen games left, including the final home matches at Stumptown Ice Den. The Wolverines play Butte at 7 p.m., Jan. 24, and then host a three-game stand against Lake Tahoe, Jan. 30-Feb. 1.

In the competitive Northwest Division of the WSHL, the Idaho Junior Steelheads are the team to beat with an undefeated record, 31-0-1. The Missoula Maulers are in second place in the standings at 24-8-1, followed by the Southern Oregon Spartans, 24-7-1. Then it’s the Wolverines, the Butte Cobras (10-21-2), the Seattle Totems (6-24-1) and the Lake Tahoe Blue (5-21-2).

Last weekend the Maulers defeated the Wolverines 8-1 at Stumptown Ice Den.

The top four teams from each division advance to the WSHL playoffs. There are four divisions in the league: the Northwest, the Western, the Midwest and the Mountain.

“For a first-year team, I think we’re doing pretty good,” says Bryan Polmear, a 6-1 forward from Calgary with nine goals and nine assists this season.

“We have a good group of guys. I think we have a good shot at the playoffs. If we bear down, we have a good shot of going pretty far this year.”

Hockey continues to make inroads in Northwest Montana, boosted by local city leagues and an infectious enthusiasm from the neighbors up north. It also helps to have one of the best teams in the nation just down the road. Since being founded in 2007, the Missoula Maulers have flourished into a successful developmental program with an impressive fan following, spurring other cities in Montana to follow their lead. This season the Maulers are the ninth-ranked junior hockey team in the nation, according to JuniorHockey.com. Home games attract upwards of 900 people per game.

“Missoula is the model. They’ve created a really good model for the state of Montana,” says Josh Steel, the general manager and founder of the Whitefish Wolverines program.

Steel formed the Wolverines a year ago and set up the team at Stumptown Ice Den as the Glacier Nationals junior hockey program was departing after four seasons for Havre, where it now competes in the Havre Youth Hockey Association.

“I came out to Montana years ago with the idea that one of the things I really wanted to change was hockey. I thought the hockey culture in Montana could come a long way,” he says. “And this building (Stumptown Ice Den) is great and I thought it would be great to see our hockey community grow.”

Steel considers junior hockey teams like the Wolverines to be important for the overall culture of the sport because they can motivate younger players to aspire to play at that level someday.

“A junior team is a big part of the puzzle. It keeps kids involved in the youth programs and plays a very important role for the whole health of the hockey community,” he says.

It appears to be working across the state, with more junior programs popping up and the overall participation in the sport expanding.

“It’s definitely growing. Montana has been a growth state for hockey, so that’s exciting,” he says.

Steel hopes to lay strong roots in Whitefish, building a program of motivated young men who are eager to succeed now and boost their chances of playing at higher levels in the future. To coach the squad, Steel brought on Joakim Falt, a native of Sweden who played professionally in Europe and who coached the Glacier Nationals previously.

Whitefish’s current roster features young players from Montana to Iowa to Saskatchewan and abroad. Aleksei Garin, a 20-year-old from St. Petersburg, Russia, is the team’s leading scorer with 17 goals and 21 assists in 33 games. Danny Roe, a Havre native who has played in Whitefish the past three years, has scored 11 goals and has 16 assists.

“There’s great team atmosphere here,” Roe says. “It was a little rough at first. We had a short bench. We’ve got quite a bit of new guys and our level of play has grown. It’s all about hard work. We just work hard every shift and never take a play off.”

Although the league can be intimidating for a first-year program, it doesn’t appear to be fazing the Wolverines. Again, just ask Cutshall.

“We’re a good team. When we play our 60-minute game, we can compete with anyone,” he says, with a wide, toothless smile.