WHL NOTEBOOK: Muench carves out official role in WHL

Kevin Muench has certainly found his calling.

The senior director, officiating and facilities for the Western Hockey League spent years as an official and now is part of the team that monitors and educates the 165 people doing the job for the WHL in Brandon and across Western Canada and the northwestern United States.

“You really have to love the game of hockey, which I do,” Muench said. “You have to like the people you work with, which I do. But I also really like the challenge of helping young officials develop their lives and develop their officiating careers.

“We’ve had so many guys who have gone on to careers with the National Hockey League, we’ve had so many officials that have experienced significant international competition, whether that’s the World Juniors, world championships, Olympic assignments.

“The opportunity to work with young officials and watch them develop to high levels of success is very motivating.”

Muench grew up in Muenster, a village located near Humboldt, Sask. When he was playing under-18 AAA hockey, he broke his leg in October and missed the entire season.

He was unable to return the next year, and instead followed his father into officiating in 1976.

“He encouraged me to start dropping the puck a little bit more,” Muench said. “I started pretty aggressive officiating at about 17 or 18, but I was still playing senior hockey at the time. I was about 23 or so my first year in the Western League.”

He did lines in the WHL for two years and then spent a decade as a referee.

Along with working a Memorial Cup, he did the national championships in Junior A and U Sports, and in 1992, he was the lone Canadian on the ice at the 1992 Olympic Winter Games in Albertville, France.

He’s certainly held in high regard. In 2011, he won the Hockey Canada Officiating Award, and in 2015, he was inducted into the Saskatchewan Hockey Hall of Fame as an official.

After his officiating career ended in the mid-1990s, Muench was working full-time in Moose Jaw and lending a hand to Hockey Saskatchewan.

“I loved the off-ice administration,” Muench said. “I got contacted (by the WHL) to see if I could do some work the next year and actually went to do an interview.”

He was hired as the development co-ordinator for the officiating department in a part-time role that expanded to full-time in 2001.

NEW JOB

The experience he brings to his job pays off all the time. In fact, he said it’s hard to imagine functioning in his role without it.

“Regardless of what kind of position you’re in, you have to have a strong understanding of the people you’re working with, whether that’s the team personnel with general managers, coaches, players or, more specifically, with our officiating staff, our referees and lines people,” Muench said. “Once you have an understanding of what they’re doing and how you need to work with them to get them stronger, obviously having experience on the ice goes a long way to recognizing problems that the officials are having, and what are some of the solutions to make corrections.

“As much as my job is to administer the program, I’m sort of like the head coach as well.”

Muench certainly isn’t alone in the league’s officiating division. He works along with development coach Brad Meier, skills coaches Tom Kowal and Vaughan Rody, manager, officiating Noah Rousseau and coordinator, hockey operations video services Alex Brodie, plus nine officiating coaches.

Muench lives in Moose Jaw but spends time in the Calgary office and on the road as well, with a rough split of about 10 days each per month.

It’s a big job.

The 23-team league can have up to 11 games per night, so it has a staff of 67 referees and 98 lines people. This year, eight referees and 12 lines people are rookies, which is about average.

“We have that turnover every year of about 15 to 20 of our staff,” Muench said. “That’s about 10 per cent or a little higher, and that’s a good thing. We do a lot of planning and projecting, especially with some of our veteran staff how long they’re going to be around and when they’re going to be leaving.”

That allows the league to plan and not end up in a situation where one-third of their staff suddenly leaves, which he said would be a terrible situation.

Just like the players on the ice, the four officials are there because of an extensive scouting network.

“We try to operate as closely as possible to how a team would,” Muench said. “The team has their scouting staff, and we do too. A team has bird dogs, we do too.

“At the beginning of every year we’ll sit down and build our prospect list, and we’ll add to that as the season goes on and work closely with the U18 leagues, the Junior B leagues, the Junior A leagues as far as who their top prospects are. We do a lot of work where we go in person to watch them, we do a lot on computer.”

As the season goes on, they also rely on their alumni, many of whom continue to serve as video goal judges or work with other leagues. They also attend officiating camps to ensure no one is falling through the cracks.

All WHL officials have to be registered with Hockey Canada or USA Hockey.

ISSUES CROP UP

With two referees and two lines of people working every game, that’s four opportunities for someone to get hurt, sick, have a vehicle breakdown, or get storm-stayed and be unable to attend.

“I don’t think people realize how often we deal with those kinds of things,” Muench said. “We’ve got people flying to their games, driving to games, we have snowstorms, and we have breakdowns. We have a good network of officials throughout the league.

“We work very closely with some of our partner leagues in Western Canada, whether that’s the Manitoba Junior Hockey League or the Sask league. As soon as we run into a situation, we’re quickly on the phone making arrangements to move guys around. Sometimes it’s a quick flight or getting guys on the road to travel.

“As far as weather goes, we rely on local officials to fill in if we have a problem. We just have to jump on things in a hurry because it happens constantly.”

It’s important to remember the officials are not full-time. Most have careers outside the game, with Muench noting that includes police officers, firefighters, lawyers, accountants, construction workers, and a host of other occupations.

While the officials require the ability to work at the major junior level, Muench said the WHL is looking for some intangibles too.

“We’re more than officiating,” Muench said. “When you look at the people we hire, one of the things we make a point of talking about at all our prospect camps is that we don’t just hire good officials, we hire good people. We bring in a lot of younger officials, and we watch them grow, going from a student to a career to getting married, to starting a family, so we really try to make sure we have balance for our officials.

“We always talk about family, career, officiating, and with those three things, you need to have the right combination in order to be effective at all of them.”

“We know if we want them to be effective on the ice, we have to accommodate their lives outside of hockey,” Muench added.

In the last few years, that also means accommodating mothers.

Alex Clarke of Weyburn became the first female WHL lines person when she did a game between the Moose Jaw Warriors and Regina Pats on Sept. 24, 2021, and on Dec. 5, 2021, she became the first woman to work a game in the American Hockey League.

Clarke, now 32, played in the under-18 AAA Hockey League and then NCAA Division III hockey at the College of St. Scholastica in Minnesota.

The five-foot-11 blue-liner was drafted 53rd overall in the former Canadian Women’s Hockey League, but after she suffered a knee injury from being kicked by a cow on her family farm, retired from playing and took up officiating instead.

She was on the ice on Sunday as a referee when the Brandon Wheat Kings fell 6-3 to the Saskatoon Blades.

Clarke has since been joined in the WHL by Cianna Lieffers, a 30-year-old teacher from Saskatoon who also serves as a referee.

“Leadership in anything is important,” Muench said. “Before we hired Alex, we had a good conversation and talked about maybe feeling some extra pressures being the first female on the ice in the CHL or Western Hockey League and making sure she would be ready to handle some of those distractions as well as handling the new world on the ice.

“One of the things about not only Alex but Cianna as well, they’re there because they’re good officials. Right now the philosophy that we take is we’re looking for the best as possible officials in the Western Hockey League, it doesn’t matter if it’s male, doesn’t matter if it’s female, we want the best possible people on the ice, and both of them deserve to be there because of the quality of work they do.”

All of us make mistakes, however, and part of Muench’s job is dealing with unhappy coaches.

You seldom hear about the officials when everyone thinks they did a great job, but if there were some borderline calls that were made or ignored, the reaction can be swift and angry from highly competitive men whose employment status is usually determined by wins and losses.

“It’s important that you don’t just talk about last night but talk about what’s going on with the program and the steps that are being taken to educate and develop officials,” Muench said of his dealings with frustrated coaches. “When there is an understanding of the program that’s in place, whether that’s through our training camps, our video work, or our coaching program, it’s important that everybody knows that there is work being done with the officials, just like with the players, to help them with their development.

“When people understand that, they don’t accept things when they don’t like them, but there is an understanding we’re working to make them better.”

Muench calls officiating an apprenticeship, where people improve by learning from mistakes. Internally, the officials are shown the mistake so they can all learn from it, rather than everyone making the same error.

He said there are always going to be errors in judgment — a hook might be called that simply wasn’t a hook — but they can’t make mistakes in controllable situations.

For instance, there should never be a mistake with a rule, because they need to know the rule book inside and out.

“When those things happen, there has to be a consequence for it, or if an official is struggling and repeatedly not meeting the standard expected of them,” Muench said. “Our officials are so good at understanding that they’re expected to perform at a high level, and they know there will be a consequence, whether that’s less games or whatever that happens to be.

“Accountability is an important part of the officiating world.”

THIS AND THAT

• QUIZ — In regular season games in which the winning team scored 10 goals, is Brandon more likely to be the winner or the loser? How about in the playoffs?

• WEEKLY AWARDS — The player of the week is Everett Silvertips forward Matias Vanhanen, an 18-year-old product of Nokia, Finland, who had two goals and eight assists in three games last week.

The goaltender of the week is 17-year-old Edmonton Oil Kings netminder Parker Snell of St. Albert, Alta., who won both his starts last week, including a 26-save shutout over the Wheat Kings on Saturday.

The rookie of the week is 18-year-old Penticton Vees forward Jacob Kvasnicka of Burnsville, Minn., who had three goals and four assists in three games last week.

• WHL CUP — The Wheat Kings will be represented by defenceman Cruz Jim and forward Ahmad Fayad. The Westman players who made Team Manitoba include Reid Nicol and Talon Scinocca of Brandon, Athens Shingoose of Waywayseecappo, and Jake Beaty of Virden.

• TRADE FRONT — The Seattle Thunderbirds sent the rights to 18-year-old Swedish forward Theo Stockselius to the Calgary Hitmen on Friday for a fourth-round pick in 2027, plus three conditional picks, a sixth-round pick in 2026, a first-round pick in 2027 and a fifth-round pick in 2029 … Prince Albert traded overage forward Harrison Lodewyk of Red Deer to the Calgary Hitmen for a third-round pick in 2027 and a fifth-round pick in 2028. That allowed the Raiders to get down to three overagers.

• SIN BIN — Wenatchee Wild forward Dawson Seitz earned three games for a charging major and game misconduct versus Victoria on Friday … Kamloops Blazers forward Josh Evaschesen received one game for checking from behind major and game misconduct at Seattle on Friday … Brandon overage defenceman Grayson Burzynski earned a two-gamer for a hit on Prince Albert Raiders forward Riley Boychuk that landed him a cross-checking major and game misconduct on Sept. 27.

• ALUMNI GLANCE — Jayden Wiens of Carrot River, Sask., 22, is entering his second season at Mount Royal University after scoring nine goals and adding 14 assists in 26 games with the Cougars last season. The well-liked forward was acquired by the Wheat Kings for his overage season from the Saskatoon Blades, posting a career-high 25 goals and also 19 assists in 67 games. In 260 career regular season and playoff games in the WHL, he had 143 points.

• THE WEEK AHEAD — The Vancouver Giants visit on Friday at 7 p.m., and the Swift Current Broncos on Sunday at 4 p.m.

• ANSWER — There aren’t many stats as one-sided as this one. Brandon is a remarkable 23-6 in the Internet era high-scoring games when the winner had 10 goals, although they are 1-1 in the playoffs.

In the 1996-97 season, they played in six 10-goal games and won them all. The last time it happened was an 11-1 loss in Portland to the Winterhawks on Oct. 18, 2023, with Brandon putting a 10-2 beating on the Edmonton Oil Kings in their last 10-goal game at home on March 11, 2023.

The two playoff games tell a weirder story. Brandon beat Edmonton 10-3 on April 5, 2016, to clinch their six-game quarterfinal series en route to the championship. Conversely, they were pounded 10-1 by the Calgary Hitmen on April 8, 2005, in Game 1 of their Eastern Conference semifinal, and won the final three games to take the series in seven.