Jeff McInnis was signing for some teeth. The then-Bentley Generals GM was a long way from home, watching his Alberta-based team compete for the Allan Cup in the Southern Ontario town of Dundas, just outside Hamilton. When you run a triple-A senior team, your list of responsibilities goes well beyond roster management. As such, when one of his charges damaged his chompers, McInnis found himself in a dental office sorting out the bill. The money didn’t catch McInnis’s attention so much as the date. It was April 17, 2014 — otherwise known as his wife, Sherry’s, birthday.
“I thought, ‘Oh no, I did it again,’” McInnis says of his tendency to overlook Sherry’s special day because of hockey-related happenings. “So there I was buying roses from a dentist’s office from my phone.”
While people associated with the Generals will say the hierarchy goes family-work-hockey, in reality, the first two parts of that equation have to mesh well with the last. McInnis is just one of a number of support staff who devote heaps of time and energy to making the Generals — now based in Lacombe, a 20-minute drive from Bentley where Rogers Hometown Hockey makes a stop this weekend — a powerhouse.
The sacrifices don’t always pay off, but the obsession with winning keeps a competitive fire raging inside McInnis and the players who are making a sometimes-challenging transition from, as their GM says, “pro to Joe.”
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McInnis, now 40, began his Generals career when he joined the team as a defenceman in its second year of existence, 2000-01. Just prior to that, a group of Bentley locals got the club off the ground in the hopes of re-creating the experience they grew up with watching single-A senior teams that had since folded.
With Bentley boy Travis Stephenson at the centre of things — his No. 16 is now retired — the Generals began trying to find their way in the Chinook Hockey League. As with a launch of any kind, the ride was occasionally bumpy.
“They started taking a 12-passenger van to games and it wouldn’t even be full,” says Sean Robertson, a former Generals player who now coaches the team. “They’d go and play and get the wheels beat off them.”
The lessons may have been hard, but the Generals clearly learned from them. In 2008, the team made it all the way to Allan Cup final. Twelve months later, they won the trophy with a thrilling double-overtime win over the South East Prairie Thunder. The Generals have now appeared in a stunning eight of the past 10 Allan Cup finals, winning the title on three occasions.
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The success in a league now called Allan Cup Hockey West speaks to the tireless work McInnis, Robertson — a rookie bench boss this season — and a host of others do to recruit new players, find those men jobs in the area and help the families settle. McInnis might go back and forth with a potential skater for a couple years while that guy winds down his career in places that stretch from Europe to the southern U.S. Because of their reputation, the Generals have pretty good luck attracting players. That said, integration can still be an issue for people who’ve known nothing but the pursuit of pro hockey dreams.
“Some of them don’t have any education after high school and they need help,” McInnis said.
Sometimes McInnis himself can provide that, finding players jobs with the commercial plumbing and heating company he co-owns with a couple other Generals enthusiasts. If there’s no space at Cremac Metal Products Ltd., McInnis depends on the local network to see who might be able to employ a man who will practise on Wednesday nights and play games on the weekend.
For Robertson, who joined the team in 2007-08 after skating for the University of Calgary Dinos and the Central Hockey League’s Colorado Eagles, the Generals were an absolute saviour.
“I was pretty miserable when I first came back,” he says. “This hockey gave me a reason to stay in shape, a reason to stay committed to the game.
“I went in there after my first game [and] said, ‘I’ll give you guys the next five years, and it’s 12 years later.”
At some point during that stretch, it became apparent that the Generals had outgrown tiny Bentley. Attendance was starting to become an issue for a team that, in a way, may have been the victim of its own success in the sense that it became less novel to go watch this local squad squish anybody who came through the door.
“We went to the City of Lacombe and we said ‘We’ve got to move or we’re going to die,’” McInnis says.
The result was a $14-million renovation to a rink that’s provided a wonderful new home for the Generals — they moved in at the start of last season — and has been a boon for the area’s minor-hockey scene. McInnis acknowledges there were some hurt feelings around the shift, but he believes those have largely healed now as Bentley residents are still just a half-cup-of-coffee drive away from the team.
“The move to Lacombe has been a home run,” McInnis says.
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More difficult, perhaps, was the fact the Generals made national headlines last year when forward Kyle Sheen unloaded a late hit on a Stony Plain Eagles player during a playoff game. While McInnis does not defend the play, the story definitely ran wild because the Stony Plain skater Sheen hit just happened to be former Edmonton Oilers winger Ryan Smyth.
Sheen is still suspended and won’t be eligible to return until sometime during this year’s post-season.
“That was one of the hardest things we’ve ever been through,” McInnis says. “We’re still going through it.”
The rub is, while Sheen obviously made a terrible decision, he’s actually been a model player for a team that values stable guys because, even in triple-A senior hockey, you’re not always sure who’s going to show up from game to game.
“His character is high, he’s low maintenance, he has a great job because he’s a great employee,” McInnis says. “So he’s exactly who I’m looking for.”
And the search never stops. McInnis’s days start at 4:00 a.m. sometimes, as he splits his time about 50-50 between work and his high-intensity hobby. The next off-season will be a big one with Lacombe set to host the 2019 national championship — not that McInnis and the Generals crew require additional motivation.
“It takes a lot of sacrifice, it takes a lot of passion, but it’s my own choice,” he says. “Some people collect stamps; [we try to] collect Allan Cups.”
