Dreger credits Brandon for driving career

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This article was published 20/11/2020 (1989 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Darren Dreger can’t imagine how he would be in his current position without an important interlude in Brandon.

The 52-year-old broadcaster, who worked in Brandon at CKLQ and served as the Brandon Wheat Kings broadcaster for two seasons, is now a hockey insider at TSN.

“I learned a lot of things that I can say with 100 per cent certainty, that if I hadn’t learned those things and been immersed in the way I was at the time, I probably wouldn’t have gotten the opportunity in Winnipeg. And if I didn’t get the opportunity, then I wouldn’t have made the relationships in Winnipeg that carried me to Edmonton, and with certainty I wouldn’t have made my way into network television in a relatively short period of time,” Dreger said. “Brandon for me, and somewhat Yorkton — that as a starting point and I still have good friends there — but Brandon to me was the foundation. Through hard knocks, I learned how to be a journalist.”

He was born in Red Deer, Alta., but his family soon moved to a farm near Langenburg, Sask., which is located between Russell and Yorkton.

Dreger had a chance to take over the farm owned by his mother and stepdad, but that didn’t feel like the right step. He also wasn’t sure if heading to university in Regina or Saskatoon was a good idea, because outside of being a physical-education teacher, he couldn’t imagine where it would lead.

He was actually thinking he might follow many of his friends and their parents into a job at the nearby potash mines.

The idea to go into broadcasting came one day in the spring or summer of 1986 when he was graduating from high school. He was in the car making the 40-minute drive to Yorkton from the farm with his mom with the radio on when he heard an advertisement for Western Academy Broadcasting College.

“I was always a talker,” Dreger said. “I chirped all the time in hockey and was the head of the social committee in high school. I always felt I had the gift for gab and felt it was a shorter program — at the time it was one year — so I thought I would investigate this.”

In the pre-Internet days that involved an exchange of letters and an interview. He was given a spot, and as it turned out, his calling.

“I fell in love with it,” Dreger said. “I knew nothing about the broadcast industry, journalism, none of that, but the months I spent there, I thought ‘I like it. I think I could be OK at it. Let’s just see where it goes.’”

He had job offers before he even graduated, eventually settling on one in Yorkton. The job gave him a chance to do a little bit of everything, from reading news to covering sports and even serving as analyst for their senior hockey broadcasts.

His partner and future wife Holly was moving to Brandon to attend the university’s School of Music in the fall of 1988, so he investigated whether there were any jobs available in the Wheat City.

CKLQ’s John Armstrong soon hired him to replace Rick Dillabough, and Dreger’s career launched in what proved to be a significant new direction.

“Just the fact that I could cover the Wheat Kings and read morning sports, it was a huge opportunity for me,” Dreger said.

Dreger threw himself into the new job, learning as he went about the intricacies of interviewing and working as a sports journalist. He credits the fact that he had good people around him in Yorkton and Brandon that helped along the way.

“You’re going to make your mistakes and I made lots of them,” Dreger said. “It’s how to tell good stories, how to conduct a good interview, how not to be pushed around. In Brandon at the time, there were so many things that were part of my job. You had to do it all.”

Dreger came to Brandon at almost the same time as the Wheat Kings hired Kelly McCrimmon as assistant general manager. The broadcaster said McCrimmon distinguished himself with his work ethic, IQ and insatiable curiosity.

“I’m not going to sit here and tell you back then I knew that Kelly was destined to be an NHL general manager or beyond,” Dreger said. “I would say it didn’t take very long being in the NHL world to recognize that Kelly most definitely had the skillset to be an NHL general manager. He just always wanted to be better, and wanted everybody around him to be better.”

Dreger said they had a challenging relationship at times — McCrimmon was always devoted to improving his team — but they remained friends. In their current positions, he called their relationship “respectful” based on their long mutual history.

Dreger did play-by-play for the team during the 1991-92 and 1992-93 seasons, two campaigns that couldn’t have been more different. In year one the Wheat Kings were 11-55-6: A season later they made the biggest turnaround in Canadian Hockey League history, going 43-25-4, a jump of 62 points.

A big part of the remarkable transformation was built around a slight youngster from Pierson who joined the team as a 16-year-old in 1991-92.

“The character and the insatiable appetite to compete, the work ethic was off the charts,” Dreger said of Marty Murray, who now coaches the USHL’s Sioux Falls Stampede. “The only thing that matched his work ethic was his skillset.”

Dreger said the addition of veteran goalie Trevor Robins and fiery head coach Bob Lowes also proved to be key pieces of the puzzle. Even so, Dreger said it surprised him just how good the Wheat Kings were in 1992-93.

The reason for the success was less of a shock.

“As driven as Kelly was and as motivated as Bobby Lowes was, the collection of talent they had and the balance they had within top-end guys and young up-and-comers making their way through, it was more the community and the family aspect that motivated that team and drove them to the results they had,” Dreger said. “It was a really, really fun year.”

Dreger still keeps in touch with players like Chris Dingman, who was a rookie in 1992-93.

At that time, Dreger’s co-worker Daren Millard made the jump over to CKX-TV. Dreger honestly wondered if Millard knew what he was doing, but as his TV career thrived and he quickly moved to Winnipeg, it reset Dreger’s expectations for what might be possible.

“He went through CKX into Winnipeg and I went ‘OK, hold on a minute here. This guy has it figured out,’” Dreger said. “That made a lot of sense to me and I followed a similar path. But we came up in an industry where you could go from rung to rung on the ladder. Now that doesn’t apply.”

Dreger chuckles that he hired Millard at CKLQ, and again at Sportsnet, something he likes to hold over the Brandonite, who now works with the Vegas Golden Knights after a long career at Sportsnet.

“We have always had a real good appreciation and respect for one another based entirely on where we started,” Dreger said.

Dreger’s career path picked up speed rapidly after his move to television in Winnipeg in 1993. He later landed a job in Edmonton, and was covering an Oilers practice one day in 1998 when he was told there was a call for him in the trainer’s office.

He suspected it was a practical joke — he and mischievous Oilers forward Kelly Buchberger grew up together in Langenburg — but it was in fact Scott Moore, a television executive who helped launch CTV Sportsnet. It turned out a guy he knew in Edmonton, Don Metz, had sent Moore a tape of Dreger on air, and Sportsnet was interested in hiring a new face who had worked his way up covering hockey.

He was quickly offered a job, and while all the duties hadn’t yet been ironed out and he considered the position well outside his comfort zone, he accepted.

“That was the clearly the big step or leap or jump that I needed because otherwise who knows what I would be doing?” Dreger said.

Dreger established a national profile with his work hosting the network’s NHL content, and in 2006 made the shift over to TSN.

Three years later, he won a Gemini Award for best sports reporting.

Dreger is now widely considered one of the top hockey insiders in the business, something that is a lot of work.

He wakes up by 7 at the latest every morning, and ensures he hasn’t missed anything overnight. By 7:40, he has his first radio segment. On a normal, in-season weekday, he might have five or six more radio hits while he’s preparing to be on television that evening.

As someone who’s expected to be one of the first to know things, he admits it’s impossible to completely disengage and have any kid of work-life balance.

“You can’t balance it. There is no balance,” Dreger said. “I know that sounds professionally selfish to say that, but if you’re turning your phone off or not consuming that information on a daily basis, then you’re playing catch-up when you come back into our world.”

Dreger said there are days off when he’ll just monitor Twitter and other information sources, and do his best not to act on what he learns by working.

“I know what I’ve got,” Dreger said. “I’ve got a coveted job in the world so even though the expectation from TSN isn’t that I’m on the clock 24-7, if I’m physically able to report and get the information out right, priority one, and first, priority two, then I’m going to do that. I’m not going to grind it out for 12 or 14 hours if I’m on holidays.”

For instance, he recently did some reports from his home studio on the reaction to the American election by NHLers.

“That’s in you,” Dreger said. “It’s in your DNA. I’ve never been good at shutting it off entirely.”

Darren and Holly have two children, 21-year-old daughter Cady and 19-year-old son Mason, both of whom are in university. The family lives in the community of Brooklin, Ont., which is northeast of Toronto near Whitby.

Dreger has made time in his busy schedule to do some work for the Alzheimer Society, something that is dear to his heart because his stepfather now has his good days and his bad days in a care facility in Langenburg. While he’s done things for the Saskatchewan and national chapters, he wishes he could contribute more.

“I want do more and I will do more,” Dreger said. “I struggle at times to identify what more is. Me talking about it doesn’t seem enough. At some point in the future I’ll get more actively involved for sure.”

 

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