WHL life was very educational for Van Oene

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This article was published 10/05/2016 (3498 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Darren Van Oene remembers Kelly McCrimmon calling to ask the night before the 1993 Western Hockey League bantam draft whether he would report if the Brandon Wheat Kings drafted him.

The Edmonton product said he absolutely would.

“Then my mom and I had to go look on the map and see where Brandon was,” Van Oene said. “We kind of looked at each other and said maybe we should have thought this through but once you got there and realized they were a classy organization from top to bottom, with (general manager) Kelly McCrimmon and (head coach) Bobby Lowes and (assistant coach) Mark Johnston, I couldn’t say enough about them.

“It was a fun time.”

It was also a productive time for Van Oene, who debuted for two games as a 15-year-old in the 1993-94 season and then joined the team for the next four seasons.

In 215 regular season games, Van Oene scored 59 goals and added 82 assists. In 60 playoff games, he had 10 goals and 18 assists.

“Every day when we came to the rink we were expected to put our best foot forward and work as hard as we can every time we stepped on the ice,” Van Oene said. “It was kind of instilled in you from the get-go and the veterans on the team when I was 16 wouldn’t let you slide either. If you weren’t doing your part, they would let you know.”

Van Oene was drafted by Buffalo and joined their farm team, the Rochester Americans, as a 20-year-old.

The six-foot-four, 225-pound forward went on to play in two Calder Cup finals, losing both times. He left the game after the lockout in 2004-05, following a seven-year career spent almost entirely in the American Hockey League.

“I kind of had an idea in the back of my mind what I was going to try after hockey,” Van Oene said. “I didn’t really want to be hanging on until I was 40 years old just because.”

He told his wife Maren as they were heading down to a nearby lake from their home near Rochester, N.Y., surprising her with a decision he said came earlier than even he anticipated.

He’s philosophical about his time in the game.

“I learned quite a bit and pushed it as hard as I could and worked as hard as I could but sometimes the stars aren’t aligned the right way and that’s the way it goes,” Van Oene said. “Sometimes it can be a pretty fine line between making it and not making it and you hope you’re on the other side of the line but in my case I wasn’t.”

Van Oene’s father-in-law owned a tugboat business on Vancouver Island, so the couple moved to Shawnigan Lake, half an hour north of Victoria.

He started out as a deckhand and worked his way up, eventually going to school to earn his ticket as a captain, a job he’s done for the past four years.

As a tugboat captain, he tows barges and logs, and guides ships into the dock.

“Every day when you go to work you don’t know what’s around the corner,” Van Oene said. “I definitely never thought I’d be here 20 years ago but it’s been fun. I enjoy it.”

The couple has two sons, Brendyn, 8, and Cole, 4.

Van Oene helps out with Brendyn’s hockey team and may end up lending a hand as Cole takes up the game this season as well.

He was last back in Brandon shortly after moving on to pro hockey to help with the hockey school.

“When I think back we were almost like a family you were with for four years and then all of a sudden after your four years is up it’s like you’re uprooted and you miss them,” he said.

Van Oene admits that he fell out of touch with the organization after his first few years of pro, although he does keep an eye on how they’re doing. He last saw McCrimmon a few years when he visited with him after the Wheat Kings played in Vancouver.

Van Oene is proud to have been part of the early years of the franchise’s evolution from also-ran to perpetually competitive.

He said the lessons he learned about respect and working ethic remain and he’s grateful for them.

“Hard work takes a guy a long way and they taught us that,” Van Oene said. “It’s hard to explain, the experience that you have there. It was an awesome experience. The game of hockey started there and it was a real good foundation. After I did stop playing hockey, I got into the real world and it takes a little while to sit back and realize what kind of skills it did give you with people and work.

“I never went to college but you can call it a college degree in life.”

» pbergson@brandonsun.com

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