WHL NOTEBOOK: Beauchemin relishes unusual playoff opportunity

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/04/2022 (1371 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Craig Beauchemin is calling playoff hockey again, but the veteran broadcaster never would have imagined it would be for the Brandon Wheat Kings.

The Swift Current Broncos employee received a call from Branden Crowe soon after the Wheat Kings broadcaster accepted a new job in communications with Hockey Canada. It was an exciting opportunity for Crowe that came with one massive hitch: He was needed as soon as the Western Hockey League’s regular season ended as the national organization prepared for a number of upcoming international events.

When seeking a post-season replacement, Crowe had to hedge his bets, however, contacting different Western Hockey League broadcasters late in the regular season because he needed one whose team wasn’t going to make the playoffs.

Beauchemin, who also serves as the Broncos’ manager of community relations and their media contact, became available when, in an odd coincidence, the Wheat Kings lost to the Prince Albert Raiders in their season finale, knocking the Broncos out of the playoffs.

Beauchemin was happy to do a favour for Crowe, who is universally well liked in the league’s broadcasting fraternity.

“I’m super happy for him to have a position like that and get a chance to be at home working,” Beauchemin said. “I can’t imagine how hard it was for him to be away from his wife basically every single weekend for the past couple of years. I appreciate him asking me to do it.”

Beauchemin ironed out the final details with Brandon’s Derrick Stewart — J&G’s chief legal officer and corporate secretary — and a couple days later received the email confirming the arrangement.

Beauchemin didn’t have much trouble getting permission from the Broncos to help the Wheat Kings out. Swift Current general manager Chad Leslie actually lives in Brandon and is a friend of Crowe’s, and the team’s executive vice president of business operations, Nathan MacDonald, also gave it his approval.

Everything was in place by Tuesday of last week.

Wheat Kings director of game day operations Chris Falko, who also juggles a lot of other responsibilities for the team, put the radio gear on the bus last Wednesday and everything was in place.

Beauchemin drove himself to Red Deer from Swift Current last Thursday, had breakfast with the team on Friday morning, met the staff he didn’t already know and called the game that night.

Beauchemin compares the task to national television broadcasters who aren’t assigned to specific teams.

“I get a chance to be a Broncos employee and then help out a friend. It’s been cool,” Beauchemin said. “Everyone has been very welcoming and I’m thankful for that.”

Ridly Greig and Landon Roberts were among the Wheat Kings who came up and introduced themselves to Beauchemin after Game 2.

“I kind of feel like it hasn’t been too, too weird,” Beauchemin said. “Hockey players are hockey players. They’re pretty much all the same, down to their core. I’m just filling in with a different team and trying to capture the excitement as best as I can. It’s been pretty exciting so far.”

A product of Whitehorse, Yukon, Beauchemin actually started as a sportswriter at the Battlefords News-Optimist in North Battleford, Sask., after attending Loyalist College in Belleville, Ont.

He jumped to his first broadcasting job a year later, doing live radio play-by-play for the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League’s Battlefords North Stars and serving as the station’s sports director.

A season later, he joined the Powell River Kings in the British Columbia Hockey League as the director of broadcasting, providing live-streaming play-by-play coverage for the Kings while also handling communications.

That led him to the BCHL’s Penticton Vees as director of communications and broadcasting for two seasons. He made the jump to the WHL when he joined the Broncos in June 2019.

Beauchemin actually has some Manitoba roots. His father Wayne was born and raised in Winnipeg and met his mother Charlene there, and his uncle Andre Brichon volunteered at Wheat Kings games for years. Two of his grandmother Simone DeBeer’s sisters also resided in Brandon.

“There are family connections around here,” Beauchemin said. “We used to go to Winnipeg all the time as a kid. We would drive from Whitehorse to Winnipeg in the family van with me and my sister (Chelsea) in the backseat.”

Chelsea lived in Brandon for a year when she was in high school as she trained with the Brandon Eagles gymnastics club. Now it’s Craig’s turn to spend some time here.

“It’s kind of nice to be here for a couple of days and get a chance to explore around with my own car, which I obviously don’t have the opportunity to when the Broncos are here on the bus,” he said.

While broadcasters certainly rely on numbers to help them identify players, there are shortcuts that come from watching a team every game all season and being on hand as youngsters turn into veterans. Physical clues like size and which way a player shoots can be combined with distinctive features like a how player skates to make them readily identifiable.

When Beauchemin joined the Wheat Kings, all those advantages were gone because he saw them only six times this season. Fortunately, he’s a quick learner.

“It is a little strange,” Beauchemin said. “The hardest part is not saying Broncos when I mean Brandon in the middle of the broadcast. I managed to make it through Games 1 and 2 without saying that so hopefully it continues.

“You see a team enough in the regular season that you get a feel for who they are and what they look like. When you have the two teams in front of you, you have your roster sheets that have all their names and numbers. I think by the time the third period rolls around, you kind of know who’s who without having to look at your sheets and recognize guys by the way they skate or shoot or just the way they look on the ice. “It gets easier.”

He said it’s even better because it’s the same two teams he’s calling every game.

Another advantage to calling the same team all season is that a broadcaster builds a library of information on each player that can be called upon to fill time as required. Beauchemin tried to compensate for that by spending time on online hockey databases to discover the previous connections between players, and adds an interesting fact or two on each player to his roster sheet.

“You try to find things about each guy,” Beauchemin said. “Some guys it’s a lot easier than others, but if you do a little digging on each guy, that’s just part of game prep. A big part of that goes on before the series starts, and then when it starts, you can reference things from games past.”

Beauchemin also had the advantage of having Peter Gerlinger on hand. The longtime Brandon analyst, who has done colour for both Crowe and Bruce Luebke, played in the WHL and later starred with the Brandon University Bobcats in the early 1980s.

“I had heard good things about him, and then for him to be there helped me out,” Beauchemin said. “It was awesome. He knows the guys a lot better than I do … He’s able to bring way more light on certain guys because he saw them way more than I did during the regular season.”

Beauchemin last called a playoff game in Penticton in 2019 when the Vees were upset by the Cowichan Valley Capitals in six games in the opening round. He’s quickly found himself being drawn into the Brandon-Red Deer series.

“It’s been a while since I’ve done playoff games and the intensity is so obvious right from puck drop,” Beauchemin said. “You have two teams who play that heavy style in this series and right from the opening puck drop guys are bowling each other over in the first couple of shifts and getting into it.

“The crowds are more intense because every play means more, especially in Game 2 when it was so tight all the way through. When it goes to overtime, every chance you’re kind of leaning forward and rocking back and forth and just getting excited. It’s just fun.

“You almost forget how exciting playoff hockey is until you get a chance to be there again.”

» pbergson@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @PerryBergson