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

counselling for the team members in an effort to prevent anyone from finding out about the abuse to which he was subjecting Kennedy.
    Bob Wilkie and Colleen MacBean in July 2007.
Courtesy of Leesa Culp.
    “You would have thought that someone in charge would have arranged for the survivors to receive therapy to help them deal with the shock and grief following the accident,” Kennedy writes, “but none of us received any kind of professional help. Nobody seemed to want to talk about what had happened.…
    “So how did we deal with the tragedy? We got back to our lives and tried to move on. We played hockey. And, as men are prone to do, we drank. Only after a few beers, or more than a few, could we talk about how the crash made us feel. Some of us wondered why we had survived while others died. We were plagued by a lot of what ifs.”
    Everyone — players and staff alike — was left to deal with their grief alone or with each other.
    Soberlak, who was seated on the bus in close proximity to the four players who died, says, “We had nobody to deal with — nobody to talk to or turn to — other than my parents on the phone.” At the time, Soberlak says, the fact that counselling wasn’t made available wasn’t seen as a big deal, at least not to him.
    “It didn’t seem strange to me because everything I’d gone through in Kamloops and Swift Current … really, I had to suck it up myself anyway,” Soberlak says. “I could tell my folks and they would always be supportive, but they didn’t know … they had no idea the stuff that went on.”
    As a fifteen-year-old playing in Kamloops, Soberlak was seen by scouts as a wonderfully talented player. The following season, he joined his hometown Blazers. But what should have been the start of a promising career was actually the beginning of the end.
    “My sixteen-year-old year shaped the way I felt about hockey,” he says. “In order to be a pro, you have to live it right through to your bones. After that season, there was a drastic change in my love for the game.”
    There were many times when Soberlak found himself thinking, This isn’t what I thought it was going to be . Today, in his early forties, with a wife and child, Soberlak is the chairperson of physical education at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops. He has a bachelor of arts in psychology, with a minor in sociology, from the University of British Columbia, and a master’s degree in sport and exercise psychology from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. And now, when he looks back, he is especially proud of one thing in his junior hockey career.
    “I’m proud that I stuck it out — fought through it,” he says.
    His stint with his hometown Blazers should have been a proud time for him. Having the opportunity to play in front of family and friends should have been a real thrill. It wasn’t.
    “It was really horrible,” he says. “In a lot of cases, I feared going on the bus, feared going on road trips … just because of the humiliation and constant verbal abuse. And then the physical abuse in practice.… I remember trying to do a practice drill [with Kamloops] and [one veteran player] swinging his stick as hard as he could at me and slashing me. If I try to fight him, what am I going to do? I got eighteen guys wanting to kick the shit out of me because I’m a sixteen-year-old hotshot hometown boy.”
    There was more, too. There was hazing and what Soberlak says was physical abuse.
    “What I went through in Kamloops destroyed my confidence,” he says. “I can deal with that now, but it was just horrific for me. It sucked the life out of me … I was physically assaulted.” The anguish in his expression is painful to witness as he recalls what he went through as a sixteen-year-old.
    “You think I have not suffered — have not had repercussions from what I went through there — serious, absolutely long-term, continuous major repercussions of what happened to me in that situation. I