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Edmonton Oilers Season Can’t Come Fast Enough

By Kurt Leavins

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The Edmonton Oilers regular season is not all that far away, but to be perfectly honest, it can not get here soon enough for me.

I don’t imagine that sentiment is unique. It has been a hope-filled off-season for Edmonton Oilers fans, starting with the NHL Draft Lottery which triggered this whole sea-change in how our beloved Edmonton Oilers are run. But you may have your own personal reasons for being excited that September is finally here. I would understand, as I certainly have my own.

I guess it hit me as I drove home on Friday night. While I absolutely consider myself an Edmontonian, the truth is I live in the country, and I commute to and from Edmonton each day to earn a living (and, in the winter, to visit Rexall Place about 45 times a year!). Friday’s drive took me past a farmer’s field, where they had just cut a quarter-section of wheat into thick, golden swathes.

Did that sight ever take me back to when I was a teenager, when Septembers were both wildly busy and (to be frank) filled with uncertainty. I’d be back to school, with a new teacher & new classmates. I’d be driving the grain truck for Dad, as he rushed to get the crop off before autumn rains started the swathes sprouting. And, amidst all of that…I’d also still be chasing my hockey dream.

Coming from a hockey family, the latter was common. The Leavins Clan put a couple kids into the NHL, and a few more into the junior ranks, all of us enjoying varying degrees of success. But Autumn, for all of us, was that time when, as mere teenagers, we faced the very real possibility of leaving our parents and the farm behind to, of all things, chase pucks around a sheet of ice.

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Hockey was consideraby less sophisticated then. Upon receiving my invitation to Moose Jaw Warriors main camp, I adopted a training routine. A 5-mile jog in the morning (before chores), a weight regime around mid-day (when the straw in the field was still too tough to combine), and then once IN the field…the very LEAST sophisticated routine one could possibly imagine:

-for cardio, each time I stopped the truck and waited for Dad to make another round on the combine, I would “run swathes”, which entailed running perpendicular to the swathes and hurdling each of them (they’d be 3-4 feet wide), to the center of the field and then a quarter-mile back again. By then, dad would be flashing his lights, indicating that the hopper was full and that he needed the truck and Me…right now!!

-for strength, I remember doing sit-ups with the door of the truck open, and my feet (clad in steel-toed work boots) lodged beneath the steering wheel. There was 6 feet of “nothing” beneath my back, as I counted 20 or 30 sit-ups at a time. Had I not been able to complete one, I’m not quite sure what I would have done. I guess the whole point of the exercise was that failure wasn’t an option.

-for shooting, Dad rigged up a net built from pasture posts and chicken wire, and then created an “ice-surface” consisting of a smooth piece of plywood, from which to shoot hundreds (well, probably thousands) of pucks. Wrist shots, slapshots and back-hands, until your wrists were so sore, your hands shook when you tried to lift your spoon to eat Mom’s feast at the Supper table.

The point is, we took every available minute to make ourselves better, to prepare ourselves for that moment on the ice when you had a fleeting chance to prove that you belonged, and that your dream of leaving the farm for a career in hockey was actually attainable. Dad, bless him, could easily have complained that his boys spent twice as much time at hockey as they did on the farm, work which actually paid the bills.

But that wasn’t MY Dad. Instead, he encouraged us, every step and stride along the way, and never once suggested that we didn’t have our priorities straight. I know for a fact that, by allowing us boys to chase our hockey dreams, it made more work for him. But if Dad ever had a problem with that, he never once said so.

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Fast forward to my afore-mentioned Friday night drive home. It’s now 30-some years later. I never did turn pro (although some of my teammates that Fall such as Theoren Fleury, Kelly Buchberger and others, went on to terrific NHL careers). And I never went back to the farm, either. Turns out, neither was what my life was meant to be.

But that experience, those uneasy days when I just didn’t know what life would bring, is never far from me. And so, when September arrives again, and farmers once more begin to knock down their crops, I check the calendar to see when the Edmonton Oilers are back in my life again.

And hockey season still can’t come soon enough.

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