MIKE JONES AWARD: U18 AAA Wheat Kings set the standard

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This article was published 03/01/2025 (258 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A season of virtually unparalleled greatness has resulted in yet another victory for the under-18 AAA Brandon Wheat Kings.

After posting a 59-4-1-0 record overall and losing in the final of the national U18 championship, the 2023-24 edition of the Wheat Kings has earned the The Brandon Sun’s Mike Jones Award as Westman’s team of the year.

“I’m going to remember all the faces in the dressing room and the good times we had as a team,” forward Brady Turko said. “It’s something people take lightly playing midget hockey — it’s something you do once in your life — but if you asked me in 20 years if I could go back and do it, I think would 100 per cent say yes.

“I think it’s one of the best times I’ve had with my friends and I’ll always cherish the memories that we made and the season that we had.”

It’s a second Mike Jones Award for 10 players — Turko, Jaxon Jacobson, Easton Odut, Colten Worthington, Loughlan McMullan, Dustin Bell, Ethan Stewart, Nolan Saunderson, Kaesen Fisher and Matthew Michta — after the U15 Wheat Kings were honoured two years ago following a provincial championship in 2022 with a record of 31-1-0-0 in the regular season and 10-1 mark in the playoffs.

The first-time winners are Jonah Lemoine, Owen Wallace, Josh McGregor, Nash Henwood, Declan Hoad, Jaxson Brick, Aiden Laing, Cole Lobreau, Cole Dupuis and Burke Hood.

In one of the greatest seasons in Manitoba U18 AAA Manitoba Hockey League history, the Wheat Kings finished a record-breaking 43-0-1-0 in the regular season for 87 points, then went 9-0 in the playoffs to win the championship.

They didn’t lose in regulation until a meaningless game in the round-robin of the western regionals, and won the event the next day. That sent them to the Telus Cup in Nova Scotia, where they went 4-3, losing 4-1 in the final to the Cantonniers de Magog on April 28.

THE JOURNEY

Head coach Travis Mealy, who was joined on the bench by Micheal Ferland and Paul Mandziuk and also had general manager Mike Brolund and manager Melanie Wallace helping out, had a sense the team would be pretty good when training camp started.

“We definitely knew we were going to be strong but you never know the steps the boys will take in the off-season from being a 15-year-old to a 16-year-old, and in Jax’s case, 14-year-old to a 15-year-old,” Mealy said. “It was tough not knowing who we would have, which is an issue we have every year.

“Once the pieces starting falling together, we knew we were going to be competitive and in the top quarter of the league and as time progressed, we got stronger and stronger.”

It didn’t help that Jacobson suffered an injury with the Western Hockey League’s Wheat Kings in the pre-season and missed the first eight games of the season, returning on Oct. 27. With Jacobson out of the lineup, Turko raced out of the gate and became an early league leader in goals and points.

“A lot of guys stepped up last year, myself included,” Turko said. “Realizing how much my game had grown from last season and how I could make a difference by myself, I learned a lot from that. It was definitely a good test for me with Jax not being there for the first little bit.”

By Nov. 1, the team was 10-0-0 and had won six games by four goals or more. Jacobson said a lot of things were going right.

“It helps a lot that we all grew up playing together,” Jacobson said. “We knew each other really well and that made it easier to come to the rink every day and have fun. “Also, it was just generally a good group of players. We had a lot of diversity of solid checking guys and skill guys and our defencemen were pretty deep and we were gifted with two good goalies who had really good seasons. It all clicked.”

The leadership group included captain Wallace and Dustin Bell, Worthington and Stewart but they weren’t called on a lot to start the season.

The Wheat Kings finally had their first taste of adversity on Nov. 10 when Sebastian Stone scored his second goal of the game on the power play in overtime as the Southwest Cougars rallied for a 3-2 victory at J&G Homes Arena to snap Brandon’s perfect 12-0-0 record.

Turko was philosophical about the loss, noting nobody is ever perfect in higher level leagues. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt.

“It affected us a little bit,” Turko said. “We off to a pretty hot streak with a 12-game winning streak to start the season and getting that loss to Southwest obviously hurt a lot of guys. We wanted to have a perfect season of 44-0 and try to get a record, and that’s pretty hard to do. Only one team in history has done it in that league. I think a lot of us thought we had a good enough team to do that but it obviously wasn’t meant to be.”

In a nearly identical season in 2007-08, a Winnipeg Thrashers club led by future National Hockey League star Mark Stone went 40-0-0 in the 2007-08 season, won all nine playoff games, lost once in the western regionals and then advanced with a victory in overtime, only to fall in the Telus Cup final.

By the Christmas break, Brandon was 23-0-1, and they reeled off 20 wins in the second half of a remarkable regular season. Mealy said he got a sense of how good his team was when they weren’t playing their best.

“It’s the games you win that you don’t deserve to win when you realize the sheer talent and skill has put you in that position,” Mealy said. “There were a handful of games last year, despite our incredible record, that we didn’t deserve to win. We got outworked and outchanced but had the right puzzle pieces to get ahead.”

He points to a game against Interlake on Dec. 17 when his team fell behind 3-1 13 minutes into the third period only to tie on late goals by Turko and Jacobson, with Jacobson then potting the overtime winner too.

“We were just so dominant on paper, and then the guys played, we had too much skill for other teams,” Mealy said. “They are 15, 16 and 17 years old, and to keep them motivated when they’re starting to run away in the league with points was a tough thing. I know they held their record and their win streak as a badge of honour, and never wanted to lose that.”

Jacobson, who was later named MVP in the Manitoba league and the Canadian Elite Hockey League’s player of the year, posted an incredible 37 goals, 69 assists and 106 points in 35 regular season games. He was one point back of the record set by Brian Kostur (1992-93) and Dustin Boyd (2001-02), with the big difference that Jacobson was 14 until his birthday on Dec. 11.

Turko (41gp, 41g, 49a, 90p), Stewart (44gp, 29g, 35a, 64p), Odut (36gp, 23g, 40a, 63p), and Worthington (40gp, 27g, 35a, 62p) were also in the top five in team scoring, while Michta (22-0-0, 1.73 goals-against average, .930 save percentage) and Hood (21-0-1, 1.99 gaa, .923 save percentage) were terrific in net.

PLAYOFFS

To open the post-season, the Wheat Kings drew the eighth-place Eastman Selects (20-23-1).

“We were excited for the playoffs,” Turko said. “The regular season was such a success but that doesn’t mean anything if you don’t continue on in playoffs. Us going into that first game against Eastman, I still remember to this day that everybody was so excited and happy. Playoffs were starting and we wanted to prove nobody was going to stand in our way.”

Brandon swept the best-of-five series with 10-2, 7-0 and 9-2 victories.

That vaulted them into the semifinals against the seventh-place Pembina Valley Hawks, who had upset Southwest in five games.

The Pembina Valley series was more competitive but the result was the same, with 6-1, 4-1 and 4-2 victories.

“That series was tougher than we honestly expected because they were a seven seed,” Jacobson said. “We didn’t have much trouble with them in the regular season but they played really hard in the playoffs and gave us some tough competition.”

The final was a matchup between the two powerhouses in the league. Either Brandon or the Winnipeg Wild — or both — have played in the last 11 league finals, and the Wild eliminated the Wheat Kings in 2018, 2022 and 2023, with Brandon winning the league in 2019.

The Wheat Kings won 5-2, 4-1 and clinched the title at J&G Homes Arena on March 26 with a 4-3 victory on an overtime goal by Worthington.

“It was a really cool experience,” Jacobson said. “With that group of guys, we knew that was the minimum. We had a bigger goal to make it to Telus and win. Winning the league was only the first step for us.”

WESTERNS

There was one more step en route to the national Telus Cup, and it was a big one. Just one team would advance from the western regional qualifier in Winnipeg, which included Brandon, the hometown Wild, Saskatchewan Male U18 Hockey League champion Saskatoon Blazers and Hockey Northwestern Ontario AAA District champion Thunder Bay Kings.

The Wheat Kings beat the Blazers 4-1 and the Wild 3-1 to book their spot in the final. In their third game, which was played on April 6, the unthinkable happened when Thunder Bay broke a 2-2 tie in the second period with a pair of goals, and after Ethan Stewart scored to bring Brandon back within a goal, the Kings added an empty netter for a 5-3 victory.

It was Brandon’s first regulation loss all season.

“I didn’t really like that game too much because it was really a nothing game,” Turko said. “If we won we made it to the final, if we lost we made it to the final. It felt like a game that didn’t go our way. Games like that are hard to get up for almost and to be your best for … We definitely took them lightly, which we shouldn’t have, but after losing that game, there was a time for us to look in the mirror.”

Mealy said his club certainly took the setback seriously.

“I know what that dressing room felt like when we lost that game in regionals,” Mealy said. “They found a way the next game to get us to the national championship.”

The next day, the Blazers and Wheat Kings squared off in a classic. Both teams had three power plays, with the Wheat Kings enjoying one that carried over into overtime, but the game remained tied 0-0.

“I don’t know if I had ever been a part of a game with no goals scored in regulation,” Turko said. “It was definitely nerve-wracking but we had a lot of chances to score in that game but it didn’t go our way. Going into overtime with the power play and not scoring, that was definitely nerve wracking as well.”

Jacobson actually left the final for more than a period to get treatment on his hip flexor and ankle.

“Obviously the guys who had played the whole game were more nervous than I was,” Jacobson said. “I didn’t come back until the late third and then overtime. It was one of those games you don’t know what to think. Both goalies were making crazy saves.”

The decisive goal came two minutes 21 seconds into overtime with Jacobson, Turko and defenceman Josh McGregor on the ice. Turko picked up the puck near his own net, skated down the ice, got away from Saskatoon forward Raiden Zacharias and ended the game in dramatic fashion.

“We lost a draw and it went down into their end and they skated into our end,” Turko said. “One of their guys fell over when Josh McGregor checked him off the puck and I picked it up and started skating up the ice. “No one really came to me and then I recognized I was one-on-one with a forward, and when you’re one-on-one with a forward, you gets stars in your eyes as the attacker.

“I made a move on him and was lucky enough to get around him and then put it into the back of the net. It’s obviously something very special to me and something I’ll carry with me the rest of my life.”

Burke Hood ended up making 30 saves for the shutout victory, with Saskatoon’s Grayson Malinoski turned aside 34 shots.

“I looked down the bench for a second and then the next thing you know, Ferly came running over and he’s hugging me,” Mealy said. “I didn’t even see the goal initially. It was definitely the highlight of my hockey career, either playing or coaching.”

But it came at a cost.

Mealy said playing four games in four days at regionals was hard on his team, which had three athletic therapists on hand.

“Thankfully we had them there because it was just a revolving door of players coming in with small injuries,” Mealy said. “Nothing too devastating.”

NATIONALS

Since the Telus Cup didn’t kick off until April 22 in Membertou, a suburb of Sydney, N.S., Brandon suddenly had some down time. But that may have been just as bad as the injuries.

“We were pretty fortunate with most of our team being healthy,” Jacobson said. “We had a few guys battling some injuries. Loughlan was battling a shoulder and Nolan had a broken finger, but that was pretty much it. We were pretty healthy but we had two weeks off and I think that was probably the worst thing for us, was taking that time off. We just wanted to keep it going.”

At the Telus Cup, Brandon opened with a 5-1 loss to the Cantonniers de Magog on April 22 and beat the Sydney Rush 7-4 on April 23. But no one was happy after two games.

“We came out pretty slow at nationals,” Jacobson said. “I think we got our eyes opened by how good of a team game Magog played and how hard they worked.”

The Wheat Kings had a long team meeting after the second game, and Mealy noted it was like a gear switched and they found their mojo again.

“They had one objective in mind, and throughout the whole year being ranked number one in the nation, their goal was to be on the big stage in that Sunday game,” Mealy said. “We definitely didn’t start off the tournament well. I don’t know if it was nerves or the time off from games, but we weren’t playing like ourselves.”

The Wheat Kings topped the Kensington Wild 2-1 on April 24, fell 3-1 to the Calgary Buffaloes on April 25 and earned a 7-4 victory over the Markham Waxers to wrap up the round-robin.

In the semifinals, Brandon rebounded to beat Calgary 4-1 and reach the final against unbeaten Magog.

“You never want to lose to a team twice in a row so us being able to beat them was something very special,” Turko said of the victory over Calgary.

But as the old saying suggests, be careful what you wish for because it might come true.

Making the final meant they ended up playing seven games in seven days, and by that point, the bumps were adding adding up.

“You won’t see that anywhere else in hockey,” Mealy said. “Near the end, I remember Colten Worthington coming in and he had bruises up and down the side of his body. He played a lot of hard minutes for us and so did a lot of those guys. It was just relentless on them.”

Mealy added he told Ferland after the semifinal that he was exhausted, and he wasn’t even playing.

“I couldn’t imagine what those boys went through,” Mealy said.

They had one more seemingly insurmountable task ahead of them.

Magog drew players from the Drummondville-Grandby-Sherbrooke area in the southeastern corner of Quebec, and entered the final with a 6-0-0 record. They had only been in one close game, outscoring their opponents 34-12 through the round-robin and semifinals.

“Magog was definitely a powerhouse team,” Mealy said. “I still haven’t watched the final on TV. One of these days I’ll put it on but they were built more like a junior team … I’m obviously incredible proud of the boys getting there. At that time, it just wasn’t for us. They had a lot more depth. You couldn’t tell the difference between line one and three.

“A lot of that week, we relied heavily on three lines and I think it came to Game 7 and we ran out of gas against a team that was able to roll four lines throughout the duration of the tournament.”

A tall task loomed larger when Jacobson suffered an upper-body injury during his first shift and didn’t return.

“The final was a tough go,” Jacobson said. “I didn’t get to play, which really sucked. I think by that time the boys were pretty gassed.”

Odut tied the game after the Cantonniers took the lead midway through the first period, but the Quebeckers scored a pair of power-play goals and went on to earn a 4-1 victory.

“Losing in the final is something that we’re always going to live with,” Turko said. “That’s something we would have loved to have won but it just didn’t work out for us. That’s how it goes some times.

“You can’t win them all, but I was very happy with and proud of our team and all we accomplished. It might be a while before another team does that.”

LOOKING BACK

Their bodies have healed since the final on April 28, and time has taken away some of the sting of ending the season one loss away from claiming Brandon’s second national U18 championship.

Instead, the long-term memories of a magical run have begun to crystallize.

“It will be the guys and all the time we spent together,” Jacobson said. “I wouldn’t want to go through it with anyone else. Even just the dressing room and having fun with the guys at practice and winning games by however many goals were really special to me.

“Looking back, that will be something I’m very proud of.”

Turko said it’s a legacy that will live beyond the players and coaching staff.

“We proved we’re one of the best teams that’s ever played in the midget league for sure.”

» pbergson@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @PerryBergson

 

PAST WINNERS:

2024 — Brandon Wheat Kings U18 AAA, hockey

2023 — Brandon Bobcats men’s futsal and soccer

2022 — Brandon Wheat Kings U15 AAA, hockey

2021 — Brandon Wheat Kings, hockey

2020 — Assiniboine Community College, women’s hockey

2019 — Brandon University Bobcats, men’s volleyball

2018 — Minnedosa Chancellors/Rivers Rams, girls’ rugby

2017 — Neelin Spartans, boys’ volleyball and basketball

2016 — Brandon Wheat Kings, hockey

2015 — Lois Fowler team, curling

2014 — Paige Lawrence & Rudi Swiegers, figure skating 2013 — Brandon University Bobcats, men’s volleyball

2012 — Neelin Spartans, girls volleyball

2011 — Brandon University Bobcats, men’s volleyball

2010 — Brandon Tri-Star Storm, women’s volleyball

2009 — Westman Wildcats, hockey

2008 — Crocus Plainsmen, girls basketball and volleyball 2007 — Brandon University Bobcats, men’s basketball, and Brandon Cloverleafs, baseball

2006 — Terry McNamee, curling

2005 — Crocus Plainsmen, hockey

2004 — Brandon AAA Midget Wheat Kings, hockey

2003 — Club West Rage, girls volleyball

2002 — Crocus Plainsmen, girls volleyball

2001 — Mike McEwen team, Linda Van Daele team, curling

2000 — Brandon University Bobcats, men’s basketball

1999 — Crocus Plainsmen, boys volleyball

1998 — Lois Fowler team, curling; Mike McEwen team, curling; Lisa Roy team, curling; Doug Armour team, curling; Rob Fowler team, curling

1997 — Neepawa Farmers, baseball

1996 — Brandon Wheat Kings, hockey, and Brandon University Bobcats, men’s basketball

1995 — Brandon Wheat Kings, hockey

1994 — Brandon Cloverleafs, baseball

1993 — Maureen Bonar team, curling

1992 — Boissevain Broncos, boys basketball

1991 — Maxine Heritage team, curling

1990 — Duane Edwards team, curling

1989 — Brandon University Bobcats, men’s basketball

1988 — Brandon University Bobcats, men’s basketball

1987 — Brandon University Bobcats, men’s basketball

1986 — Vincent Massey Vikings, girls basketball

1985 — Vincent Massey Vikings, girls basketball

1984 — Brandon University Bobcats, men’s basketball

1983 — Mabel Mitchell team, curling

1982 — Mel Logan team, curling

1981 — Cec Leach/Petey Two, retrieving

1980 — Brandon University Bobcats, men’s basketball

1979 — Brandon Wheat Kings, hockey

1978 — Riverside Canucks, baseball

1977 — Brandon Wheat Kings, hockey

1976 — Deloraine Royals, hockey

1975 — Vincent Massey Vikings, girls basketball

1974 — Don Barr team, curling