Dan Falloon
A paperwork mix-up left the Fort Frances Thunderhawks out of their quest for the Allan Cup, but the team is at odds with Hockey Northwestern Ontario as to which side is responsible for the mistake.
The T’hawks were set to appear in the HNO final Sunday afternoon against the host Kenora Thistles after recording a pair of ties during round-robin play.
The squad had skated to a 3-3 draw with the Thistles on Thursday night, then rallied from a five-goal deficit to tie the Thunder Bay Twins 5-5 on Friday night.
But Thunder Bay protested the eligibility of Thunderhawk Jamie Davis after they lost 5-1 to Kenora on Saturday night to eliminate them from further contention.
HNO brass met Sunday morning to determine Fort Frances’ fate. In the end, the Twins’ protest was upheld and the Thunderhawks were disqualified from the tournament.
Thunderhawks’ manager Dean Bruyere was unhappy with the decision, arguing Davis appeared on a registration form that was faxed to the HNO office before the Feb. 10 deadline.
The registration sheet also included the other players the squad was picking up in advance of the deadline, including Nathan Miller, Cody Mosbeck, Dallas Mosbeck, Tony Palma, Josh Myers, and A.J. Tucker.
Those six players appeared on the Thunderhawks’ final roster, but Davis did not.
“On the [registration] sheet, I went over it and went, ‘Oh my goodness, Davis ain’t there,’ but then I looked a little closer and I had penned all the names of the guys that we had registered that day except for Jamie Davis because his name was typed, the first name on the list.
“His signature was on it and everything,” Bruyere recalled. “They must not have seen him, either.
“They didn’t see Jamie Davis’ name on there, and they didn’t push him through on their end, at HNO,” Bruyere argued.
The cover sheet of the roster Bruyere faxed to the HNO office was dated Feb. 10 at 3:30 p.m., in advance of the deadline.
“We sent that document in,” he confirmed. “First, they told us that Jamie Davis didn’t qualify because he wasn’t re-registered.
“[But] we signed all those guys on the same date and we shipped that thing off.”
Bruyere said that while he faxed those documents, player registration was done through the Fort Frances Minor Hockey Association.
Attempts to reach representatives from the FFMHA were unsuccessful.
HNO general manager John Pucci said that registration was only one of the documents where Davis’ name needed to appear, pointing out Davis did not appear on the Hockey Canada electronic registry.
“By Hockey Canada and HNO standards, the player must be registered electronically to be
registered,” explained Pucci.
“The Fort Frances Thunderhawks are responsible for registering all their Senior ‘AAA’ players online on the Hockey Canada registry,” he stressed.
Pucci also said the registration on which Davis’ name appeared was a document intended to supplement the Hockey Canada registration.
“What happens in junior and senior hockey is [there are] usually disputes about who a player signed with, so in order to back-end the electronic registration, we ask for the paperwork to be sent in,” he remarked.
According to Pucci, the official roster is comprised of the players who appear on the Hockey Canada registry on the cutdown date.
“What I do is for all the junior teams and the senior teams is on the cutdown date, I take the roster off the Hockey Canada registry and send it out to all the teams,” he said.
“In this case, for Senior ‘AAA’ hockey, I took the Thunderhawks’, the Thistles’, and the Twins’ rosters off the Hockey Canada registry and sent them to all three teams, so they knew who was there.
“I didn’t hear a dispute on Feb. 11 about Jamie Davis,” Pucci noted. “Now, it’s a month later and they’re disputing his registration.
“I definitely think the onus is on a manager to know who’s registered with his own team,” he concluded.
Bruyere said when he received that copy of the rosters, he checked for names that were on his faxed registration. And when he saw a couple of them, he figured the whole lot were on the roster for the NHO final.
“When I looked at our roster, I started looking at our roster and thought maybe they didn’t make it. I saw Cody, Dallas, yeah, there they are, so I stopped looking,” acknowledged Bruyere.
Bruyere was disappointed with the decision given the Thunderhawks were just starting to heat up, rebounding from a 5-0 third-period deficit against Thunder Bay to even the game.
“We played very, very well, and we were getting better,” he said. “We were starting to roll.”
Tucker, Tommy Biondich, and captain Ian Lockman had scored in the 3-3 tie against Kenora, with Chris Medicine holding down the fort in net.
Against the Twins, the T’hawks began the rally from five down at 6:14 of the third with Ross Johnson tallying.
Fort Frances then reeled off four goals in a 4:29 span to tie the score, with Lockman connecting twice in one shift, and Kevin Webb and Tyler Barker adding singles.
The Thistles ended up capturing the HNO crown with a 3-1 over the Twins to advance to the Renwick Cup final, where they’ll meet the winner of the Ontario MLH best-of-seven showdown between the Whitby Dunlops and Dundas Real McCoys that began last night.
The Renwick Cup champs then will vie for the Allan Cup, which runs April 19-24 in Fort St. John, B.C.
