The veteran defenseman talks about his career, his season with the Brahmas and his thoughts on the upcoming season. The Texas Brahmas have announced the re-signing of veteran defenseman Craig Minard for the 2008-09 season. I spoke with Craig recently about his experiences in professional hockey, how he came to join the resurgent Texas Brahmas and his thoughts on building upon the success of last season.
Q: Coming out of the University of New Brunswick, you signed with the Greenville Grrrowl (ECHL) and played there for a couple of seasons. You’ve been in the Central Hockey League for a long time. What do you feel are the differences between the two leagues?
A: It’s been a few years since I’ve played in the East Coast League but when I did make the transition, It was a mid-season transition, so I definitely saw the comparisons. I think maybe the East Coast is a younger league; you get a lot of the young guys coming right out of college to play there. Typically you get an older base (of players) in teams in the Central League. Skill-wise and speed-wise, the East Coast League might be a little better, but as far as a team game, I think the Central League is better. I definitely think that the top teams in both leagues are comparable. If they were to have a series between the two top teams, it would be a six or seven-gamer. I don’t think the differences are that great. I think now in the CHL, the parity in the league is unbelievable. It just shows you when Arizona comes in and wins last year, that anyone can really win in our league and every team’s in it right until the end. We had a bunch of real good playoff runs. I think in the East Coast League you have so many teams and sometimes the top teams run away with it.
Q: In the mid-season, 2001-02, you hooked up with the Bossier-Shreveport Mudbugs, where you spent most of your career in the CHL. How did that come about?
A: Well, actually Scott Muscutt and I were college roommates. My first year at UNB was his last. He was obviously the Mudbugs coach. I didn’t have the opportunity to come down right after college. I really wanted to. I had a buddy playing in Greenville and that door sort of opened up for me. When I was traded from Greenville the second year, it was pretty much a no-brainer. I called Musky right away and said, listen, I’ve been traded, but I’d rather just come to Shreveport. I just knew that was a place I could go and spend a few years. I wasn’t a young guy coming into pro. I was 25. I didn’t want to be traded. Obviously every guy wants to go to the next level but I knew in my head that Shreveport was likely somewhere I could go and play for a few years and I wasn’t willing to pack up and move every couple of months which often happens in the East Coast League. So I called Musky and we worked things out right away and I got there as soon as I could and spent the better part of five years there.
Q: You played 10 games with the Hull Stingrays in England during the 2004-05 season. What was your experience like playing there?
A: I can’t really say anything bad about it. For me, it didn’t work. I was very angry and frustrated at the end of the season before that when we lost that controversial game to Laredo in game seven, and I frankly just said to myself I didn’t want to play in the CHL anymore after all that went down. Playing for the Stingrays, it was an option that I had. It came on the table kind of out of the blue. I had family in England; my Mom’s whole family was from there. It seemed appealing at the time. It just wasn’t, like I’m a pretty competitive guy and I just didn’t feel like I was playing for something. You know, I was playing more for a paycheck and it just didn’t fit for me. I had a good time there; I wasn’t there very long (laughing) you know, and I really felt bad leaving – that’s not the type of person that I am, to go somewhere and quit. My girlfriend at the time, who’s now my wife, and her son were back in Shreveport. You know, the more I thought about it, I was sort of shooting myself in the foot. I wanted to go back and I really still wanted to win that championship that was stolen from me and the guys that I played with. I kind of turned it into something that was a positive for me and it still is. It drives me to this day to win that championship that they stole from me. It was a really tough decision. Like I said, I don’t like leaving a place and the coach there was unbelievable to me and that was the one big regret I had, that I left him.
Q: Was it pretty easy to make the decision to go back to Bossier?
A: Yeah, I called Musky. We kept in pretty good contact. You know, he wasn’t very happy that I left. Obviously, he wanted me back, but totally understood where my heart was and why I was so upset. The biggest thing for me in that whole thing was, I had a couple of really good buddies, that still to this day are probably my best friends in the world, on that team, and that was their last shot. And just to get robbed like that, I was furious. I mean I think I just took it out on the wrong people. My girlfriend suffered, I suffered. I felt like I should be back in Shreveport, so it was definitely a no-brainer.
Q: You had a great season in Bossier, in 2005-06 and then went on to play in Lubbock. The Cotton Kings, after the 2006-07 season, basically had the same situation that occurred with the Fort Worth Brahmas in the sense that they were having lease issues with the City Bank Coliseum and eventually made the decision to suspend operations. Unfortunately, they didn’t come back and the Brahmas did. How did it come about, joining with the Brahmas?
A: Well, I actually played as a kid with Dan Wildfong, and then obviously we played for five years together in Shreveport. I’ve known him since we were 10 or 11 playing together. As soon as there was talk that our team was folding, it was right around the same time that it was announced that he had gotten the job. I knew I was going to be a free agent so I called him to touch base. It was going to be Shreveport or the Brahmas. It was the two places that I wanted to be. I talked to Fonger a lot. I felt like I could come and be a part of building something. I just knew that it was going to succeed as soon as they hired me. I just knew it. The guy works so hard. He’s so passionate about everything that he does. Obviously, it made him a hated person in the league, but as a teammate, you couldn’t ask for a better person, a better guy and a better player. When I knew he was coming and Forbie was coming, I was thinking this was such a great opportunity to be a big part of something and help build something. I can remember playing in Shreveport coming over and thinking, man, what a place this would be to play in. What a great city. It’s too bad that they don’t do better, because it’s such a great place to be, you know.
Q: You ended up playing with a lot of your old teammates including Anders Strome from Lubbock and Dan, Forbie, Blair Manning, Scott Sheppard, Cacciola…was it kind of a Mudbugs reunion for you, coming in with the new Brahmas?
A: Yeah, and I think that was something that Dan had in his mind. There’s no question that Scott Muscutt is an unbelievable coach. He kind of sets the foundation not only for that season but he puts things in your head in order to make you a better player and a better person. I think just knowing that you can get players that are already in that mindset is a bonus. There were so many unknowns for Fonger coming in as a first-year coach, into a new city and if you have some familiar faces and you knew what you were getting out of them every night, that was a bonus for all of us and we loved playing together obviously. We had a good run there that last year in ‘05-06 and lost in the finals but had a great team, a good group of guys so the fact that we could get a couple of guys to come over was a big bonus for all of us.
Q: Dan has said that Musky was probably his biggest influence in his development as a coach. Did you see similarities in Dan as a coach versus a player in the way that Musky coached?
A: Oh definitely. Yeah, their personalities are very similar. First and foremost, they’re workers. When they played, and I played with both of them, they worked their tails off and they do the same thing as coaches. They’re both very passionate and intense. Everything you want in a coach. Sometimes, too intense, both of them, but I’d take that over not intense enough any day. They put it all on the line and expect that from their players. Some people can do it and some people can’t. I’m sure some of it was learned from Musky but I think definitely a lot of it is just that their personalities are similar. They’re very similar people.
Q: Coming in as a veteran defenseman, did you feel a sense of responsibility to help pull the D corps together last season?
A: Well, we had Vellinga who’s played for more years than I had, Chris Mann had played three or four years, Kinnunen had played four years pro. Laurila came in, just under a vet. Kevin (McLeod) was our only young defenseman in the sense that he hadn’t played any games pro. I knew the systems Fonger was going to want to use and a lot of that would be new to guys, so I felt as a player, I could maybe help out and try and understand how the system that he wanted to play was going to work and basically tell them that it would work. I don’t think I ever put any pressure on myself to try and pick up the slack or anything but I think that being an older guy, I love it. I love watching the young guys develop…I loved watching McLeod grow last year. What a player he turned out to be.
Q: How did you feel about the “slump” the Brahmas experienced around the New Year and what do you think contributed to everyone coming together and playing strong for the rest of the season?
A: I think there are a few factors. Every year, you’re going to go through your slumps and sometimes you need them. We started out really good, kind of riding high. I wouldn’t say we got cocky, but like I said before, there’s so much parity in the league and you have to be ready to play every night or you’ll lose. Flat out, you will not win because any team can beat you. I don’t think we thought that way, early on. There were certain games we thought, oh, you know, we should be able to slip through here with one. And then you get into December and some guys get thinking about Christmas and family stuff and distractions here and there. We had a few injuries, you know. Shep got hurt and that didn’t help us and we lost Thompson for a little while. I think there were a number of things that caused it. I don’t think we ever lost confidence in what we could do.
In January, we got on a roll and then we’d go on a road trip and we’d be looking to win two of three and we’d get all three. OK, that’s good, let’s go to the next week and we were, realistically, in a playoff battle from January on. If we had gone into another slump, we wouldn’t have made the playoffs.
At that time, Shreveport was kind of running away from everyone. Rocky Mountain was still gone as far as we were concerned. We had to catch Mississippi. Our leaders stepped up and were like, boys, if you haven’t been in this league, you’re going to find out and you better find out now, we could be out of the playoffs by February. That was sort of the thing that pushed us. Then we had guys healthy and guys started buying into the system and we saw that it was working. We just kept working hard and that was a big thing that Fonger always stressed, just keep working, keep working. We’ll lose some nights even when we’re working hard but let’s not throw any away. If a team’s going to beat us, they’re going to have to outwork us. That became sort of our war cry. It just turned out that more often than not that in the second half, if we outworked teams, we were winning. It was just a process from the first day. We said we were going to work hard. That was the biggest thing. We were going to work hard. We had our slump and we learned from it. You can go one way or the other and we learned from it and we got back on track and the timing was perfect for us.
Q: The rivalry between the Mudbugs and the Brahmas has been a big one over the years and it was good set of games during the regular season. After defeating Mississippi, I don’t think anyone was really sure what was going to happen in the series between the Bugs and the Brahmas. Certainly, no one expected that the Brahmas would sweep the Mudbugs. How sweet was that victory?
A: I just thought it was an amazing accomplishment for our team and our whole organization. I don’t think if you look at the series, it wasn’t like we swept them. I mean it wasn’t even close. Every game. Cameron scored that huge goal in game two with point three seconds or whatever it was, to basically steal that one from them. I think that was perhaps the turning point of the series. They knew they had to come to our rink for the next two, down 2-0. I still think that we went into a really great situation. We were definitely the underdogs. They were the Governor’s Cup Champions. They were expected to beat us. I think that they had a lot of pressure on them. It was probably one of the best accomplishments I’ve ever had as far as hockey goes, being able to beat them because they had a great team. Their goaltending was probably the best the league has ever seen as a one-two punch. Like I said before, we got it in our minds that if we outworked a team, we could beat them. We had a great team. We had big forwards. We had a mobile D that could move the puck. Both of our goalies were playing well. At that time, I don’t think it really mattered who we played. We were playing so well and we were confident in what we were doing. Fonger was confident and he was doing his homework, you know obviously we played them a lot during the season and had done well against them so I think we were just ready for them.
Q: The Brahmas pushed all the way to a game seven showdown with the Colorado Eagles. Although the outcome was not what you would have preferred, did you feel a sense of accomplishment as a player having done so well during the season and in the playoffs?
A: Yeah, maybe more so now. When it was over, I was disappointed. I still, to this day, think we had a better hockey team. The first game, I don’t think we were totally focused on what we needed to do after the series before that. We weren’t even there. It wasn’t us and we kind of handed them one. And then game two, I thought we outplayed them and just came up on the short end of it. It’s unfortunate – that’s the way things go. But like we said all year, you work to maybe win one the next night. Maybe you don’t deserve it until the next night. And we didn’t really deserve, you know the way we played in game one, we didn’t deserve to win game two. I look back at that as one of those that we let slip away. Game seven, I think if it was two minutes longer, I think we score and it goes into overtime for sure. That’s how much we were all over them. But it certainly was an accomplishment. They had a great team and I definitely think that we wore on them and that hurt them in the final. That’s why they were swept. I think we took a lot out of them. It’s still disappointing. I look back at it as one of those missed opportunities. We had two when I was in Shreveport. I thought both years we lost to Laredo, we could’ve beat them. I still feel the same way about that series against Colorado. We could’ve beat them…I don’t think we lost the series in the seventh game, I think we lost it in the first two.
Q: With the divisional realignment, besides Shreveport, a new rivalry for the Brahmas will be with the Laredo Bucks. What’s your feeling playing against the Bucks?
A: We played them twice last year. Both were really good games. They obviously are going to have a good team. They do every year. Ruskowski is one of the best coaches in the league. I love playing that team. Terry’s always got them ready to go every night. You’re not going to catch them on a bad night because they just don’t have them. You just got to be ready every time you play them.
I think that rivalries add to every game. The fans get into it and the players are up for them a little bit more. I think it’s going to be a great rivalry. I don’t think the one with Bossier is going to go away at all. I just think we’ve gained a new rival and it’s in our conference. Because points are so important in this league no matter what division it is, we play Shreveport 10 times and those points are going to be as important as those 7 games that we play against Laredo. So I think to have those two teams as our rivals – they’re two of the premier teams in the league – you get a chance to see how you stack up against the best teams in both conferences. I think it’s great.
Q: Dan’s put a fantastic team together again this year. There are still a few players that have signed that have not been announced by the Brahmas yet. But adding players like Jason Deitsch, Andrew Leach and Lance Galbraith and some of the others, what is your confidence level going into the season with this new team?
A: I’m confident that we’re going to work hard. Really, until we get on the ice and get going, I keep my mind pretty open. I’m more confident in Dan’s ability to recruit and to go get players that he wants to get. If he’s getting the players that he wants, I’m confident that we’re going to be competitive in the league for sure because he wouldn’t have them around if they couldn’t play his style. So, I’m excited, really excited because some of these guys I haven’t seen before. I‘ve never seen Deitsch play. I played against Galbraith when I was in Greenville, but it was a long time ago. I love the way he plays and the way he competes. So I‘m really excited. But like I said, until we get going on the ice and see how everyone fits together, there’s just so many unknowns. We need to come together as a team, that’s the biggest thing. We can have all the talent in the world but if guys are going in different directions, it’s just not going to work.
Q: In closing, the fan support was great for the first year of the new Texas Brahmas. How did you feel about the fans and the type of support that they gave to the players during the season?
A: Oh, it was incredible. I thought they were unbelievable. It didn’t matter if it was a Tuesday in November or in March on a Saturday night. We had our core group and they were passionate and you know, they just love their team unconditionally almost. Sometimes you wanted them to tell us we didn’t play well and they didn’t. They love being part of it. I honestly think that at the end of the year, our fans in our building won us some hockey games. It was an intimidating place to come in and play. We’re going to need it again this year. That’s something that as a player, you can’t say enough how important it is to have those people in the seats and cheering for you and making you feel like you’re doing a good job. I’ve played in front of 12,000 in Shreveport and I honestly think that there were nights at NYTEX that were louder with 2,000. I loved it. I love playing there.
Photo Credit: Chip Crail
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