B00ADOAFYO EBOK by Leesa Culp, Gregg Drinnan, Bob Wilkie Page A

airframe structures for aircraft manufacturers.

CHAPTER 8
    Sober’s Story
    B ob Wilkie spent the evening of December 30, 1986, in hospital. The Swift Current Broncos defenceman wasn’t going anywhere, and the way he felt, he really couldn’t think of a place he would rather be.
    While he and team captain Kurt Lackten shared a hospital room, many of their teammates ended up at the home of Colleen and Frank MacBean. Sheldon Kennedy, Joe Sakic, and Dan Lambert billeted with the MacBeans.
    Frank was a local lawyer who found time to serve on the Broncos’ board of directors. He had been involved with the numerous attempts to bring a WHL franchise back to Swift Current. Colleen was an English and history teacher and guidance counsellor at Swift Current Comprehensive, a local high school.
    Sheldon Kennedy (left), Joe Sakic, and Danny Lambert, sporting Cooperalls.
Rod Steensland.
    The players who showed up sat in the MacBeans’ basement and cried and laughed and cried and laughed some more. They were awake until the early hours of December 31 as they tried to make at least some sense of what had happened, trying to understand how it was that four teammates had been killed in the crash of their team bus just a few short hours earlier.
    Of all the places to be in Swift Current, the MacBean home likely was the best place for everyone, considering the circumstances. Colleen and Frank had first become billets when a hockey friend of their son Nick’s needed a place to stay. The MacBeans would go on to provide a second home to more than forty players. But most importantly, if anyone knew the trauma these Broncos players — all of them teenagers, most of them away from home for the first time — were going through, it was Colleen and Frank. Not only was Colleen a guidance counsellor, but she and Frank had been through the tragedy of losing two of their sons in an automobile accident. Kevin and David, both of whom had been adopted and were just thirteen years of age, had been killed two years earlier.
    Colleen said of the night of the bus accident, “Many of them just huddled up right here on the floor, staring off into an unknown future, while Frank and I simply listened. We listened to their passions, their dreams … and encouraged them to do what the guys would have wanted them to do: finish the season, be positive and reach for their goals.”
    Colleen would later be honoured with the WHL’s Distinguished Service Award, in 2006. This award is presented annually to an individual associated with the league who has made an extraordinary contribution over an extended period of time. But on the night of December 30, 1986, it was Frank who said “Life must go on,” and how true that was.
    One of the players huddled in the MacBeans’ basement on that blustery night was Peter Soberlak, who had been acquired from the Kamloops Blazers earlier in the season. Soberlak doesn’t remember a lot about what he refers to as “post-accident,” but he remembers being in the MacBeans’ home. And he remembers a New Year’s Eve party in someone else’s home the next night, only because Darren and Trevor Kruger, whose brother Scott had been killed, were there.
    At the time, Soberlak wasn’t far removed from being considered the best player in his age group in the West, if not all of Canada. But, unknown to anyone but Soberlak, he was struggling with his own demons. Soberlak was only seventeen, but he was quickly losing his love for the game and he knew it. He just wasn’t sure how to deal with it.
    And now, on top of that, he was in an unfamiliar home, trying to understand what had happened to him and his friends only a few hours before.
    In the aftermath of the accident, grief counsellors were never provided for the players or anyone else in the organization. In Sheldon Kennedy’s book, Why I Didn’t Say Anything, which was published in 2006, Kennedy writes that he suspects general manager and head coach Graham James rejected