WHL NOTEBOOK: Jordan rebounds from tough start to season

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This article was published 29/03/2022 (1446 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Cole Jordan’s Western Hockey League path certainly hasn’t been an easy one this season.

The six-foot-two, 204-pound defenceman, who skates for the Moose Jaw Warriors, battled a condition called rhabdomyolysis, which results from overworking the body. “My muscles in my legs basically gave out on me,” Jordan said. “One day I was skating in July — just a regular skate — and the entire time it felt normal and then right at the end my legs just gave out on me. I couldn’t walk for a better part of a week.

“Slowly things started to come back but I just wasn’t feeling like myself. My strength just wasn’t at 100 per cent. It was maybe at half of where it could have been.”

Rhabdomyolysis is a breakdown of damaged muscle that results in the release of muscle cell contents into the bloodstream, which can cause organ damage.

“They said part of it could have been dehydration along with heavy load workouts and then skating quite a bit,” Jordan said. “Everything just combined and my muscles shut down basically. It’s just crazy. It’s a super rare thing that you obviously just don’t see in hockey. It’s nothing ordinary, that’s for sure.”

Jordan headed out to camp with the Calgary Flames — the team that selected him in the fifth round of the National Hockey League entry draft with the 141st overall pick last July — and they were careful not to put him into any game situations, instead monitoring his progress.

He returned to Moose Jaw and played the first two games of the season, a home-and home series against the Saskatoon Blades on Oct. 1 and 2.

“It was just not the same as I could have been,” Jordan said of the opener. “The next night, things weren’t quite as good and I wasn’t feeling quite as good so then we decided it would be better for me to take some time off and regain that strength in the gym and then slowly get back onto the ice and get my conditioning back.”

There is no treatment or medication that could speed his recovery: Instead, time off was what he needed. He stayed in Moose Jaw, doing leg workouts to restore the strength. Where he had once been able to do barbell squats of more than 300 pounds, Jordan said he couldn’t squat 20 pounds at one point.

Once his energy began to return after about a month, he was also allowed on the ice.

He was able to get in for a consultation with a neuromuscular specialist in Saskatoon about six weeks ago, and they ran a battery of tests on him that confirmed the diagnosis. They also gave him some good news.

“They ran everything and they all my muscles look good and healthy now,” Jordan said. “It’s not something that should reoccur. It was pretty positive in that sense.”

The payoff came when he was finally able to return to the lineup for a game in Swift Current against the Broncos on Dec. 10.

“It was a super exciting day,” Jordan said. “It was the longest I’ve ever been off. When that day came around, the coach and trainer said I was good to go again and it just felt unreal. I was definitely fired up to get back out there.”

Still, he admitted it took time to feel like he was completely back.

That’s when disaster struck a second time.

In a game in Alberta against the Edmonton Oil Kings on Jan. 25, he suffered a completely unrelated knee injury on an awkward hit.

“My knee kind of squished up against the boards and twisted and I ended up spraining my MCL,” Jordan said. “From the day that it happened until the next game I played was three weeks. I only ended up missing five or six games but honestly, that injury might have been even tougher than the first one.

“Getting back and being excited about playing and then that happens not too long after and you have to sit out again, that was really tough.”

Oddly, all four members of the Wheat Kings team that won the Manitoba U18 AAA Hockey League title in 2019 and are still playing in the WHL have faced extended time away due to injury.

Brandon’s Nolan Ritchie broke his femur in November 2019, Moose Jaw’s Daemon Hunt sustained a badly cut forearm in December 2019 and fellow Warrior Calder Anderson lost the first few months of this season to knee surgery.

“Me and Calder were both hurt at the same time at the start of the year, when he found out he had to get surgery on his knee, so before he went back to Brandon we were working out together every day and watching the games together every night,” Jordan said. “We talked about it. Obviously guys are going to be down and out in that situation so we tried to lift each other’s spirits and chat and help each other out.”

Ritchie, Jordan and Anderson are all back in the lineup now, but Hunt is currently dealing with a lower-body injury that has him on the sidelines.

Jordan, who Moose Jaw listed and later signed after he went undrafted by the WHL in 2017, put up three goals and seven assists in 23 games last season in the Regina hub, eclipsing the seven points he earned in 38 games as a rookie.

This season, he has one goal, seven assists and 34 penalty minutes in 29 games with a plus-minus of 12.

Moose Jaw has been considered one of the pleasant surprises in the WHL during the 2021-22 campaign. The fourth-place Warriors are three points up on the fifth-place Saskatoon Blades, with home-ice advantage in the first round of the playoffs up for grabs.

“We’ve got a ton of depth in our forward group,” Jordan said. “We’ve pretty well got four lines that can score and our defence group when we’re healthy is the exact same. We’ve got six really solid defencemen. We’ve got a team that is built to win and we have good coaching. We’re working hard every day and trying to make each other better in practice and that translates into games.”

Oddly, when Jordan and the Warriors visited Brandon on March 15 in what proved to be a 7-1 win for the Warriors, it was only Jordan’s second time playing a WHL game in his hometown — and in front of father Marty, mother Jennifer and sister Kelsey — due to healthy scratches as a rookie in 2019-20, the Regina hub season in 2020-21 and his injury this year.

He’s well aware that time is rapidly ticking down on his junior career, something he couldn’t fathom a couple of years ago.

“It’s been insane,” Jordan said. “I was talking about it the other day with one of the other older guys. When you come into the league at 16 or 17 as a rookie, you hear all the 20-year-olds and 19-year-olds talking about how fast it’s going to go by and you have to soak it all in and make sure you work hard every day and don’t take anything for granted.

“At that age, you’re ‘Oh ya, whatever. It’s four or five years, it’s going to feel like a long time. Then you get to be 19 and it’s ‘Wow, it’s absolutely flown by these past three years.

“It goes really quick.”

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