WHL NOTEBOOK: Rookes finds new home in Swift

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This article was published 25/02/2025 (206 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Kurt Rookes has discovered the wisdom that can be earned in mistakes.

The five-foot-11, 185-pound Rookes, who turns 20 next month, is in his first season with the Swift Current Broncos but his second in the Western Hockey League. With experience has come the ability to accept he can’t be perfect all the time.

“As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that you can’t let one mistake ruin the whole game for you,” Rookes said. “You have to let it go by and keep going because at the end of the day, you made a mistake, but if you let that translate into the rest of the game or the next week of practice, nothing is going to get better. That’s helped me a lot.”

It’s been a season of transition for the farm kid from Manson, which is tucked inside the Manitoba border 20 kilometres east of Moosomin.

The undrafted Rookes attended a couple of camps with the Winnipeg Ice, and after spending his 17-year-old season with the Manitoba Junior Hockey League’s Waywayseecappo Wolverines in 2022-23, he made the newly christened Wenatchee Wild last season.

Rookes appeared in 30 games with Wenatchee, with four assists and 34 penalty minutes. As it turned out, he wasn’t in their plans this year.

“I went to Wenatchee at the start of the year and just how things were shaking down in Wenatchee was that they were going one way and I was going the other,” Rookes said. “I ended up getting claimed on waivers by Swift Current. It was on my way home so it was ‘Hey, I might as well stop in and see how it goes’ and it worked out well.”

While his time in Wenatchee may not have ended the way he wanted, Rookes said it was an incredible experience for a farm kid to move to another country and the big city.

“It was awesome, especially now in the middle of winter when it’s so cold,” Rookes said with a laugh. “I’m looking back there thinking how good it was. It was spectacular. It’s not that we didn’t get out much when I was young but living in a different country in a different part of the world was a lot to change but it was change in a good way. It was really fun.”

The move to Swift Current was a comfortable fit for Rookes for a couple of reasons. A big one was because the roster was assembled by general manager Chad Leslie, a Westman product who has nine Manitobans playing for him.

Along with Rookes, they include Brandonites Clarke Caswell and Josh McGregor, Daxon Yerex of Oak Bluff, Rylan Gould of Headingley, Luke Mistelbacher of Steinbach, Reid Dyck of Winkler, and Winnipeggers Peyton Kettles and Grayson Burzynski.

“I know a lot of them, Gould, Burzynski, Caswell, Dyck, Mistelbacher,” Rookes said. “I played against them all growing up so there’s been a big rivalry through our childhood and everything, and now it’s cool to get to know them personally after you spent so many years in Yellowhead playing so hard against them. Now we’re teammates and it’s a lot of fun.”

He’s also enjoying the city of just under 17,000 people, which is half of Wenatchee’s population of 35,000.

“It’s been good,” Rookes said. “I have really good billets here and it’s a nice place. It’s a small town and little more like my feel. I like it a lot. The coaching staff is great, the guys are great, it’s a good community to play in for sure.”

He is about an eight-to-10 minute drive to the rink, and lives in an area where many of the players are billeted.

Rookes said his role hasn’t changed a lot from last year. He’s never been a natural goal scorer at any level — his career high in goals was 12 in his second under-15 AAA season with the Yellowhead Chiefs — but his penalty minutes have always reflected his gritty, in-your-face approach.

“I’m a shutdown, get under the skin of the other team, play a hard game and keep it simple,” Rookes said. “I have to do my thing out there and play my own game and help the team out with whatever they need.”

Happily for him, that resulted in his first WHL goal in a game against goalie Ethan Simcoe of the Edmonton Oil Kings on Jan. 15.

It came 11 minutes 50 seconds into the second period to put his team up 2-0 in a 6-3 victory. Sawyer Dingman, the son of former Brandon Wheat Kings legend Chris Dingman, earned the only assist.

“It’s a funny story,” Rookes said. “One shift before, I had an unbelievable chance and the goalie made a great save. I was so mad. I looked over at my linemates and said ‘I’m scoring this game because I can’t live with myself if I don’t after that.’

“Sure enough, on the next shift I came in on a rush and one of our 16-year-olds, Sawyer Dingman, kicked it out to me and I just saw a hole. It was really good. It was a great feeling to get that one out of the way.”

A fascinating part of first goals is the reaction of a player’s teammates, who are often as excited as the guy who snipes. Rookes received a nice reaction when he got back to the bench.

“It was great,” Rookes said. “Adding to it, after not scoring the shift before, everybody was ‘Don’t worry about it, it will come’ and the next shift it comes. It was really good. Everybody was super happy.”

In 42 games, he has two goals, four assists and 52 penalty minutes.

One of the beauties of having Rookes on the roster is that he played defence and forward growing up. As a result, he can be shifted around if his team is missing players, and he’s moved back to the blue-line for three games this season.

“Growing up I played both so much that I’m pretty comfortable with both but it’s a whole different look to the game,” Rookes said. “You can see so much more, you have more time, it’s not as much down and back, it’s more controlled, making the right play. I really enjoy it.”

The move from Wenatchee meant Rookes moved from the Western Conference to the Eastern Conference, which is giving him a whole new crop of buildings to play in. It also gives him more stops at Westoba Place, which is a 128-km drive from his hometown.

“It’s been really cool,” Rookes said. “I’m very grateful for that because I’ve now played in every single rink in the league. It’s a lot of fun. Some guys through COVID, for instance a guy like (former Wheat Kings and Broncos blue-liner) Zach Turner — I was talking to him when he was here at the start of the year — he played in the league for four years and never got out to the States because he was hurt the one year.

“Switching conferences is the coolest thing because you get to see how different it is and how similar it is.”

The change also gives him the opportunity to explore some new buildings.

“That’s one of my favourite things, honestly,” Rookes said. “Just seeing the city and the rinks and the different fanbases, it’s really cool. Obviously there are some pretty impressive buildings around the league so it’s fun to be able to go see them, and not only to see them, but be able to play in them in front of their fans. It’s really awesome.”

Swift Current, which sits in eighth place in the Eastern Conference, has been a bit of a puzzle this season, with fantastic play bracketed by some stretches of real inconsistency. Rookes acknowledged there have been ups and downs but said the players remain confident.

“I think we’re confident,” Rookes said. “Lately we’ve really been tightening our systems up and playing hard … Going forward, we have to find our consistency a little bit. We’re beginning to play the right way now and keeping each other honest. It’s definitely driving in the right direction and I’m excited to see where it shakes down.”

With the playoffs finally near — Rookes and the Broncos have 13 games remaining and are 11 points up on the ninth-place Red Deer Rebels with a game in hand — those gains in consistency will be tested soon. Rookes is optimistic the Broncos can make some noise.

“I think we’re going to surprise a lot of people in the post-season,” Rookes said. “We’ve added a couple of veteran D-men (Marek Ročák and Hunter Mayo), we’ve got (Dyck) and Joey (Rocha) in the net. We can score up front too, we have some pretty skilled top-six forwards.

“If we get rolling here, it could be pretty scary. When we get going, it’s going to be hard to shut us down.”

THIS AND THAT

• QUIZ — Dozens upon dozens of Wheat Kings graduates have gone on to careers in the National Hockey League. Which 10 former Wheat Kings played the most NHL games?

• WEEKLY AWARDS — The player of the week is 17-year-old Medicine Hat Tigers forward Gavin McKenna of Whitehorse, Yukon, who posted three goals and six assists in four games to extend his point streak to 35 games. It’s his second time winning the award.

The goaltender of the week is overage Calgary Hitmen netminder Daniel Hauser of Chestermere, Alta., who went 3-0-0-0 with a 0.67 goals-against average and a .969 save percentage with back-to-back shutouts, including one over Brandon on Saturday.

The rookie of the week is 16-year-old Prince Albert Raiders defenceman Daxon Rudolph of Lacombe, Alta., who had a goal, five assists and a +9 rating in four games.

• SIN BIN — With no column last week, here are two weeks of suspensions.

— Spokane forward Cameron Parr received two games for a game misconduct assessed against Tri-City last Friday.

— Seattle forward Nathan Pilling received two games for match penalty against Portland on Feb. 17

— Wenatchee forward Ben Davis received two games for checking to the head major and game misconduct against Seattle on Feb. 16.

— Calgary forward Ben Kindel received two games for cross-checking major and game misconduct against Prince Albert on Feb. 15

— Regina defenceman Dayton Deschamps received six games for a checking-from-behind major and game misconduct against Saskatoon on Feb. 8

• ALUMNI GLANCE — Brandonite James Shearer is loading up on the frequent flyer miles this season. The 27-year-old defenceman began the year back in the ECHL as an alternate captain with the Utah Grizzlies — the team he began his pro career with after the school year ended in 2020-21 — but he left to join Ujpesti TE of Hungary’s Erste Liga. After an apparent misunderstanding over salary, he left after two games to join the Guildford Flames of the United Kingdom’s Elite Ice Hockey League, where he has an assist and two penalty minutes in 14 games.

Shearer played 202 regular season and playoff games with the Wheat Kings over three seasons. Shearer, who had been listed by the Wheat Kings after being dropped by Calgary and was playing with the Steinbach Pistons, signed with Brandon during the 2015-16 season and was on the third pairing of the championship team. After graduating from Brandon as captain following the 2017-18 season, he spent four years at the University of Calgary suiting up for the Dinos.

• BIRTHDAY BOYS — Some former Wheat Kings born this week are Hardy Sauter (Feb. 25, 1971), Logan Thompson (Feb. 25, 1997), Rhett Ravndahl (Feb. 26, 2005), Rick Knickle (Feb. 26, 1960), Eastyn Mannix (Feb. 28, 2005), Mike Wirll (Feb. 28, 1982), Sami Sandell (March 1, 1987), Jay Fehr (March 2, 1989), Morgan Klimchuk (March 2, 1995) and Ron Popplestone (March 3, 1961).

• THE WEEK AHEAD — Brandon has 13 regular season games remaining, with seven at home and six on the road. Three of the games at Westoba Place are this week, with the Edmonton Oil Kings visiting on Wednesday, the Lethbridge Hurricanes on Friday and the Medicine Hat Tigers on Saturday.

• ANSWER — Here are the top Wheat Kings for NHL games played.

— Ray Ferraro — 1984 to 2002 — 1,258 games played.

— Brad McCrimmon — 1979 to 1997 — 1,222 games.

— Bryan McCabe — 1995 to 2011 — 1,135 games.

— Jason Chimera — 2000 to 2018 — 1,107 games.

— Wade Redden — 1996 to 2013 — 1,023 games.

— Brian Propp — 1979 to 1994 — 1,016 games.

— Laurie Boschman — 1979 to 1993 — 1,009 games.

— Brayden Schenn — 2009 to present — 998 games.

— Ryan Reaves — 2010 to present — 910 games.

— Travis Hamonic — 2010 to present — 887 games.