White relishes new opportunity with Wheat Kings

The Brandon Wheat Kings added a local assistant coach with a National Hockey League pedigree Friday when they hired Ryan White.

The 38-year-old White, who retired after the 2020-21 season, played 332 regular season and playoff games with the Montreal Canadiens, Philadelphia Flyers, Arizona Coyotes and Minnesota Wild.

More recently, he served as a full-time assistant coach with the Manitoba Junior Hockey League’s Winkler Flyers for parts of two seasons and as a development coach at Western Canada Hockey Academy.

The Brandonite said his family — wife Sarah, eight-year-old son Gordie, four-year-old daughter Molly and 16-month-old son Reggie — is now in the right place so everything was where it needed to be for him to return to hockey.

“We’re in a good spot right now,” White said. “My wife is going to back to work after our youngest and we’re done having kids and it’s time to start raising them. I thought it would be a good opportunity to get myself back into hockey. I truly miss being at the rink and being part of the game. An opportunity arose and I tried to put my best foot forward.”

The Western Hockey League club announced in early May it wasn’t renewing the contracts of Mark Derlago and Del Pedrick, creating a pair of vacancies.

Brandon head coach and general manager Marty Murray said White is a great fit for the Wheat Kings in a lot of ways.

“He’s a great person,” Murray said. “He’s honest, he’s fair, I think he made a career being a player who worked hard every day, played with passion and was a good teammate. We expect those same attributes coming in as a coach, having that passion.

“He resonates well with our players, a lot of them know him from working in a skills capacity over the last couple of years. It will be real good for our guys to have a little bit of familiarity with him. At the same time he’s an honest guy who played at the highest level and was willing to do whatever it took for the team to have success.”

White played his minor hockey in Brandon and in 2003 was drafted by the Calgary Hitmen. He suited up for 275 regular season WHL games and 59 playoff games with the Hitmen over four seasons, and signed with Montreal in 2008.

He made his NHL debut on Nov. 5, 2009, drawing an assist in a 2-1 shootout victory over the Boston Bruins.

After five seasons mostly with the Habs but also in the American Hockey League with the Hamilton Bulldogs, he signed as a free agent with Philadelphia in August 2014 and after two years there, signed as a free agent with Arizona in July 2016.

In February 2017, he was part of a massive deal that sent him to Minnesota.

After four seasons in the minors starting in 2017-18, he retired after spending the 2020-21 season in the ECHL.

MOVING ON

White said the idea of coaching always appealed to him when he was still in his playing career. As a self-described rink-rat who simply loves hockey, he listened closely to what his coaches told him and appreciated their guidance.

“I wanted to continue to give back to the game the way these guys did for me and help the next generation help get to where they want to go,” White said. “If I didn’t have those good coaches, I don’t think I would have played where I played. Part of it was seeing what those guys were doing and seeing how much fun they were having and they were still part of the game and still putting their best foot forward every day and trying to win a championship.

“That really resonated with me when I was playing.”

With his playing career done, he began his coaching career in Winkler during the 2021-22 campaign. But in February 2022, his son Gordie was diagnosed with a rare brain cancer called diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma.

“That put it into a bit of a blender,” White said. “We moved to Winnipeg after he started treatment so it turned me into a fan for the rest of that year. The next year I was going back and forth. We rented a place in Winkler and moved back to town. We were doing my son’s treatments in Winnipeg so we were in a good spot to go back and forth.”

He was full time with the Flyers at that point, but after the 2022-23 season, the family moved back to Brandon to have the extra support of their parents. He still helped out Winkler from afar as they cruised to an MJHL championship.

While the players took pointers from his NHL experience, White learned from the other coaches.

“There is a pretty big commitment to coaching,” White said. “You don’t just worry about yourself anymore, you worry about the 23 guys who are on the team and start to wear different hats. That was probably the biggest thing. You’re not just a coach, you’re the guy sharpening skates, you’re booking hotel rooms, you’re booking meals, you’re trying to assist any way you can with the management side of things.

“You have to keep the ball moving in the right direction, so that was obviously an eye opener.”

Another lesson was how to get through to younger players. White was an incredibly hard-working, self-motivated player who took instruction well, and that’s not always the case for others on the ice.

But there is a unifying element he was able to build on.

“The thing that hasn’t changed is that players still want to get better,” White said. “They’re craving a way to get better and craving coaching, and that made us better as a staff, just to do the best we could to put them in a good situation so they are learning and getting to the places they want to go.

“It’s a rewarding feeling seeing your players move on to the next level, and seeing it with some guys who didn’t quite believe they could get to where they got to.”

Above and beyond hockey, White said he’s just as proud of the players who built on what they learned at the rink and found success off the ice as they moved into their careers.

While he probably doesn’t get many Christmas cards from the guys who played against him, White is held in the same kind of esteem around the rink that longtime local coach Ken Schneider is. In the first NHL lockout, White was home skating with the U18 Wheat Kings, which just happened to be coached by Schneider.

White never played for him, but quickly grew to appreciate how he related to the teenagers on the ice.

“From the outside looking in, that’s how he treated his players every day,” White said. “The guys loved him, and I loved being around the rink during that time because it was fun. You have to make them have fun and make them feel comfortable, especially when you’re going to be demanding and ask them to essentially go through a wall for you and create that extra one or two per cent that’s going to help a team win.”

His personal experience was that if he thought a coach had his back, he played harder for him. That makes building those personal relationships that much more important.

“Nowadays especially, the kids have enough going on,” White said. “They’re getting pulled in every which direction by their agents, their parents, scouts, social media, there are things all over the place.

“From that standpoint, I think players sometimes need to feel a little love, to feel that we’re there for them and we’re rooting for them. We’re the guys pushing them to believe in themselves sometimes.”

NEXT CHAPTER

After the move home with his family, White got a job at the WCHA. He said the support of Wheat Kings and hockey academy owner Jared Jacobson at that point means a lot to him.

When they were hashing out the terms of his coaching contract the other night, White made a point of thanking him.

“He stuck his neck out for me and gave me an opportunity so I could move home with my family in a tough time, and now he’s giving me an opportunity to move forward in my career and get back to the rink,” White said. “We need people like that in the game and we need people like that in Brandon.”

Part of the new gig at the hockey academy was helping with skills work with the Wheat Kings over the last couple of years. The team has weekly practices targeting skill development, and White and WHCA director of player development and mentorship Tyler Dittmer were familiar sights at them.

Murray said that background will help a lot.

“So much of practices, after practice or before practice, is working on those small-area things,” Murray said. “I’ve said multiple times that my time on the ice after practice with (former assistant coach) Mark Johnston did so much for my development, and I think Whitey has the ability to do a lot of those same things.”

Even before White started to work with the WHL team in a skills capacity, he skated with Jaxon Jacobson, Josh McGregor and brothers Brady and Easten Turko.

He said they’ve been listening to his terminology and thoughts on the game for a couple of years, and thinks it should transition seamlessly when he joins the staff this fall. Plus his previous work with the team allowed players to get to know him in a different light.

“Coming from the skills side of it, you’re not controlling their ice time or necessarily being there on the negative side of it,” White said. “It was always a really positive experience the last couple of years and hopefully that kickstarts things with the guys.”

BACK TO THE WHL

When he was playing, he figured the future would take care of itself and didn’t worry too much. But when he arrived at the end of his career without a plan, it was a difficult transition.

“It’s hard when you don’t know what to do,” White said. “For a lot of us, we love the game and really want to stay a part of it. For myself, that’s why I feel like I’m at my best. When I come home at the end of the day after coaching, I feel rewarded and I feel like I’m a better person and can be a better father.

“I’m working with things that make me feel good about myself too.”

A big part of his ability to take the Wheat Kings job is Gordie’s health. Happily, his son has been stable for four-and-a-half years and the tumour hasn’t grown.

“He’s living life like a normal kid, going to school and playing hockey and playing baseball,” White said. “He’s doing everything everyone else is doing so things are going as well as they possibly could be. February will be a big month for us, that will be five years, so it will be a big milestone for Gordie.

“We don’t have a ton of answers for what the future may hold, but the way things look right now, it looks like it should be a positive future for him and that’s a long ways from where we were four-and-a-half years ago.”

White said the chance he had to work a nine-to-five job over the past two years gave him a real sense of how fortunate people are to live the hockey life. While it’s long hours and time away from family, he enjoys the bus rides and life on the road.

In fact, he’s eager to use that time to hear some old war stories and pick the brain of Murray, who was a Wheat Kings star when White was a youngster.

And he’s just happy to be part of a team again.

“That’s what I’m most excited about, being a part of something again and trying to win and looking for that thing at the end of the tunnel that you work for every single day,” White said. “If you’re working at it and doing things right, you’ll be there at the end of the day.

“I understand firsthand that it comes with sacrifice and it comes with some hard things, but most things I’ve seen in life don’t come too easy anyway.”

» pbergson@brandonsun.com