As the Steinbach Pistons — the 2018 Manitoba Junior Hockey League champions — headed to Nipawin for Game 3 of the ANAVET Cup, they made a special stop along the way.
“I don’t think we really understood the magnitude of how powerful visiting the crash site was going to be,” Pistons coach Paul Dyck said, describing how the team made their way to the scene of the collision where 16 people in the Humboldt Broncos organization lost their lives last month.
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“As we neared it, 10, 15 kilometres prior to that intersection, there was a different anticipation. The bus was very quiet, the guys were all looking forward through the windshield,” he continued. “And then the moment we arrived, it was really something I hadn’t ever experienced before — it was incredibly sobering.”
“You still see the skid marks, and the soil’s been disrupted in the ditch and you can still smell the diesel fuel and oil. It made it very real,” Dyck said.
The Pistons are battling the Nipawin Hawks for the right to go to Chilliwack for the RBC Cup, Canada’s National Junior A Championship. The Hawks were in a series with the Broncos during the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League playoffs when the crash took place on April 6.
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Many of the Steinbach Pistons knew players on the Broncos. One of the people injured in the crash was former Steinbach Piston, Matthieu Gomercic, who was traded to the Broncos in 2016.
“We wanted to make sure that everybody had enough time to pay their respects.”
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