Here is a clip from yesterday's Ottawa Citizen - a must read for all with Tier II Jr.A. interests...





Greg McArthur and Gary Dimmock
The Ottawa Citizen


Wednesday, April 19, 2006


Until the Junior A hockey team came to town, there were only two reasons to
visit Deseronto: Walleye fishing and cheap cigarettes from the Mohawk
reserve.

It was Marty Abrams, a onetime Washington Capitals draft pick who grew up
near Deseronto, who was the visionary behind the team. The idea caused the
town to come alive.

People lined up to get involved with the club. Norm Clark, the town's
Scottish police chief, was club president. Chuck Morgan, the owner of the
Main Street variety store -- appropriately named "The Store" because it was
one of the only ones -- became the team's trainer.

Families volunteered as billets and agreed to house and feed the players for
the season.

They called them the Quinte Hawks, hoping to attract fans not only from
town, but from the entire stretch of land that borders the north shore of
the Bay of Quinte, an inlet off Lake Ontario. The arena's nine-by-nine metre
storage room was outfitted with a new shower, a paint job and was suddenly a
bonafide locker room. A new wooden grandstand increased the rink's capacity
to 600. The ice pad didn't lose all of its small-town charm, though. At the
west end of the rink, behind the home team's net, there was metal mesh
instead of glass. It looked like a chicken coop and the players named it
accordingly -- "The chicken wire."

The town finally had something to be proud of. This wasn't just another
fishing derby, when the anglers fly in and leave just as quickly. This was
for real, the best thing to happen to Deseronto since Hugo Rathbun -- the
New Yorker who opened up a timber mill in 1848 on the Bay of Quinte and
watched the town blossom.

The team played in the Metro Junior 'A' League -- two steps away from the
NHL and one step from a U.S. college scholarship or major junior team like
the Ottawa 67's. The league had teams across southern Ontario and in the
U.S. It wasn't sanctioned by the Ontario Hockey Association so the rules
were a little looser; in this outlaw league the players could fight twice
before they were sent to the dressing room, instead of being tossed after
one.

The boys came from across Canada: Toronto and Sudbury and from as far away
as Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island.

But there was a problem: The Hawks were crummy.

In their first six regular season games they notched only one win. The
fireworks -- the team lit fireworks before their home debut against Syracuse
-- had faded. Expectations were high, especially in a town that didn't have
a lot to cheer for. Greg Royce, the local high school teacher who coached
the Hawks, wasn't producing. He was a nice guy, the players said, but his
inspirational speeches, often touching on the ancient wars of history or
hockey legends, weren't doing it for them.

The Hawks needed to be pushed.

It was at an October practice in 1996 when Dave Frost and his boys first
appeared. "I swear to God for a second everyone on the ice stopped and said
'Holy s--t. Who are these guys?' " says David Maracle, one of two Mohawk
boys who made the squad. The six of them stood in the stands, aligned in a
row. They wore identical red-and-white Toronto Young Nationals jackets and
trendy footwear, Roots Boots. Most of them sported the same haircut, a
mullet -- with the sides shaved short and a tuft of hair at the back. "They
looked like a gang staring their cold stare, like eagle eyes," says Matt
Barnhardt, the other Mohawk forward. "They all kind of looked the same."

Without a word to the players, or even the captain, the Hawks had five new
teammates: Larry Barron, Darryl Tiveron, Shawn Cation, Sheldon Keefe and
Mike Jefferson -- who would later change his name to Mike Danton and plead
guilty to hatching a plot to kill Frost.

Frost, the man with the shiny-tipped cowboy boots and the sandpaper voice
was their new assistant coach.

It was the perfect place for a coach in exile.

- - -

There was something different about these Brampton boys.

Three of them -- Barron, 20, Tiveron, 20, and Keefe, 16 -- lived with Frost
in a roadside motel room. The younger ones who were still in high school --
Keefe, Cation, 16 and Jefferson, 16 -- didn't say a whole lot and when they
did open their mouths it was usually about Frost; Dave didn't want them
talking much and Dave thought this was best for their career. In the gym
class at Napanee District Secondary School, the Brampton boys refused to do
certain games and activities on Frost's orders. Some players found it
strange the boys didn't acknowledge the locals, except for a handful of
girls. "They wouldn't talk to them. They'd barely talk to the teachers. They
did their schoolwork and that was it. Like robots," said Colin Scotland, a
winger from Cole Harbour, N.S.

"They didn't make a lot friends in Napanee or Deseronto I would say. They
weren't a social bunch. I don't think they know 10 other people in that
town," says Morgan Warren, a player from Prince Edward Island.

Some called them a cult. Some called them a clan. The boys would do nearly
anything that Frost asked of them. Shortly after Frost showed up, the Hawks
had individual meetings with the coaching staff. Jason Flick, one of the
goalies, says he was told he was in a slump and his girlfriend was to blame.

He had to get rid of her. The goalie told them he didn't want to end it, so
the Brampton boys went to work, he says. A few days later the girl came
sobbing to Flick in the high school cafeteria saying she couldn't take it
anymore. Some of the Hawks had told her to get out of Flick's life because
she was ruining his career. They were giving her dirty looks. It was over,
she said. "It wasn't a serious relationship or anything, but who does stuff
like that? Whatever he wanted done, got done. That's for sure," Flick says.

Who were these guys? Most players on the Hawks knew nothing about Frost's
boys and their past. They had no way of knowing that Frost was running out
of leagues where he was welcomed.

Before he rolled into Deseronto, the coach had been reprimanded for his
team's violent play and he was forbidden from getting behind the bench in
two Toronto area leagues. The Ontario Hockey Association banned him until he
responded to allegations he served alcohol to minors during a hazing party.
He was also under suspension from the Metro Toronto Hockey League for
allegedly forging player release forms. It didn't end there. He had also
been rejected by the Metro Junior 'A' Hockey League after he apparently lied
to its officials. Before the start of the 1996-97 season, Frost showed up at
a Toronto Ramada Inn for a league meeting. He proposed a new franchise and,
according to the league's president, told the board he was speaking on
behalf of NHL player Andrew Cassels. The president, Bill Markle, was
suspicious. "I was kind of surprised he was purporting to be there on behalf
of a professional hockey player and had no documentation to verify that,"
Markle says. They made some calls to confirm that Cassels, who grew up in
Brampton with Frost, was involved. The professional player has nothing to do
with him, they were told.

Frost had been a coach without a team -- until he got the call from Marty
Abrams.

He walked into the job with an impressive resume. He had guided a bunch of
15-year-old kids on the Toronto Young Nationals to a Bantam provincial
championship. He also had the five Brampton boys, all of them extremely
loyal to their coach. Jefferson, a gritty third-line centre, was the most
loyal of all. He hardly spent any time at his billet's house. It was the
same routine almost every night, says Elena Phillips, the retired nurse who
housed the teenager for the season: He came home from school, ate dinner --
on game nights it was a pasta dish with plain sauce from a can -- grabbed
his school books and went to the hotel. He rarely talked but was always home
by 10 p.m. curfew.

He was just as rigid and regimented on the ice. He would fight anyone, no
matter how big or strong. There was one game when he got into it with a
player from Aurora but didn't realize the guy was a lefty. He was pummeled.

He dragged himself into the dressing room at intermission and got an earful.
David Maracle remembers Frost telling Jefferson that the teen had
embarrassed him. He ordered Jefferson to scrap him again and again he took a
beating, the players say. "I think by the third time he fought him it was a
draw," Maracle says.

The whole team noticed it: How Frost would order Jefferson to grab him a
glass of water and the boy would oblige and how Jefferson would fetch
Frost's inhaler at the coach's command. "It was like a dog going to get his
master's paper," says Corey Batten, the other goalie.

Jefferson was eager to please this man -- even if it meant giving him a
massage.

They were on the bus and, like most road trips, the players stripped down to
their underwear. That might sound strange to anyone who hasn't played
competitive hockey, but guys often "gear down" when they're coming home from
a game. It's a long trip with lots of bodies in a confined area so it's more
comfortable if you're in nothing but your boxer shorts.

But it is unusual for your coach to ask for a neck rub.

During one roadtrip, Frost hollered for Jefferson to come up to the front of
the bus where the coach was sitting. Frost had taken his shirt off and was
bare from his mid-section up. He told the teen his neck was sore. Jefferson
sat beside his coach. He worked Frost's neck and shoulders with his fingers
for about an hour, while the rest of the players joked and talked at the
back, Morgan says.

"I remember thinking what kind of teenage boy comes up in shorts and rubs
his coach's back for him?" the trainer said. "Mike never said anything. He
just came up, did what he was told and that was it."

It wasn't the only massage, the players say.

One player, Ian Larocque, said there was nothing exploitative about the
backrubs. Jefferson had an interest in physiotherapy, he says, and he once
gave Larocque a massage when he had an injury. However, Frost told the
Citizen he's never heard Jefferson say anything about wanting to be a
therapist. By most accounts the only thing Jefferson ever talked about was
making the NHL.

- - -

This new assistant coach was no one's assistant. He was speaking up in the
locker room. He stalked the bench during games. He leaned with one foot on
the boards and cracked his neck from side to side, a trademark twitch the
Hawks can still imitate to this day. Greg Royce was still the head coach on
paper but that was it. "From the moment Dave Frost got on that bench, Greg
Royce became a door opener," says Steve Jefferson, Mike's father who
attended nearly every game.

If there was a coming out party for Frost, it was probably the Oct. 27 brawl
with the Wexford Raiders, about a week and a half after his boys rolled into
town in their Roots Boots.

No one's sure exactly how it started but everyone remembers how it ended: In
the corridor of the Wexford arena, two teams in each other's faces, chopping
at each other with sticks, swearing and taunting.

Parents were grabbing their kids and dragging them out. LaRocque, the
assistant captain, was swinging his stick like a helicopter. The police were
called to escort the Hawks from the rink. And where was Frost? In the middle
of it all holding a fire extinguisher above his head. It looked like he was
ready to chuck it into a crowd of Wexford players and fans. "It would have
killed someone," says Barnhardt, one of the players who tried to stop him.

"That was the first time I saw him really mad. His face was just red."

Eventually, every team in the league began to fear playing in the chicken
coop.

"Other teams would come in and they kind of started laughing -- they only
did it once," says LaRocque.

"People were so f--king scared of our team it was sick ... There was no
tougher guys in that league than the f--king 20 guys we had on our team,
I'll tell you that."

The Wexford brawl marked the first of five times police would get involved
with the Quinte Hawks that season. There was the December tournament where
seven cruisers were called to a brawl with the Thornhill Islanders. There
was the other time a referee called the authorities because a Deseronto fan
threw a glass bottle at him. And then there was the brawl to end all brawls
-- the warmup fight against the Pickering Panthers.

It was Jan. 17, "Family Night" at the Deseronto Arena sponsored by Peter
Boyer's Chev Olds dealership.

There wasn't a single referee on the ice and the first-place Panthers were
short bodies. They had been hit by a bug. One Panther called it a case of
the "Deseronto flu" -- a sudden illness that strikes a day or two before a
road game in Quinte country.

The Hawks had recently traded for a goon -- "a cuckoo" as Morgan Warren
calls him -- named Matt St. Amand. He was 19 and at 235 pounds he outweighed
most of the teenagers by 60 pounds.

He wasn't a great puck handler or the fastest skater, but he was skilled at
one thing and that's why the Hawks wanted him.

"I don't even know why he brought a stick on the ice," says Barnhardt.

Suddenly, in the middle of the warmup, the "cuckoo" skated across centre
ice. The sound of a ringing cathedral bell rained down from the arena
speakers, followed by the screech of AC/DC lead singer Brian Johnson.

I'm a rolling thunder, a pouring rain/I'm coming on like a hurricane

In front of all the fans, with no referees in sight, St. Amand reared back
and swung his stick. It was on.

My lightning's flashing across the sky/You're only young but you're gonna
die.

The Hawks swarmed the outnumbered team from Pickering. There were bloody
Panther noses and fat Panther lips. The referees scrambled to get onto the
ice.

You got me ringing -- Hell's Bells.

It took the rink staff about 30 minutes to clear the helmets, gloves and
sticks from the ice. The Napanee Beaver published a four-column wide photo
of St. Amand cocking his fist over the head of a Panther who was on all
fours, trying to hide under a linesman.

The Hawks beat Pickering 7-3. They started winning all the time. They went
unbeaten for 11 games shortly after Frost was brought in and they quickly
moved into second place. The fans spilled out of the arena and everyone in
the league was terrified of turning off Highway 401 into the "Heart of
Walleye World" -- the official slogan on Deseronto's welcome road sign.

But how? How could one coach take a bunch of teenagers, mostly 16-year-olds,
and the worst team in the division, and turn them into an unstoppable army?

- - -

She didn't own the hotel but she ran it like a family business. Vicki
Boutilier, the manager of the Bay View Inn, lived in the two-storey, brick
hotel with her husband, Leo. Her mother worked as room cleaner. She had a
staff of young women -- "my girls," she says. There were never any major
problems at the roadside inn, which was mostly used by fishermen.

Then Dave Frost moved in.

The deal was the team would pay for Frost and the three players to live
there for the year. They each got one meal per week from the downstairs
restaurant, which Boutilier also managed. They stayed in Room 22, a
two-bedroom suite with a cramped kitchenette and a pullout couch. Boutilier
and her husband lived in the suite next door.

Girls from Napanee District Secondary started showing up at the hotel. There
were a couple regulars. One was 17 and two were 16. Boutilier's mother,
JoAnne Stinchcombe, was horrified when she found condoms strewn on the
nightstands and on the floor.

Enough was enough. Boutilier banned the girls from coming in after 10 p.m.
but it didn't work. They contacted the boys through their upstairs window
and someone would come down and let them in. In the morning, Boutilier found
something, a brick or a stone, propping open the entrance door.

The league didn't like the housing situation, either. Hockey officials
across the country were beginning to take a critical look at coaches and how
they are screened. Out in Alberta there was a story brewing, the kind that
makes parents cringe.

In November, a successful Western Hockey League coach named Graham James was
charged with sexually assaulting two of his former players. Less than two
months later he pleaded guilty. One of the players was Sheldon Kennedy, an
NHL forward, but his name hadn't been reported because of a court-ordered
publication ban. Two days after James was sentenced and Kennedy had dried
the tears he wept in a Calgary courtroom, the player and his wife invited a
select group of reporters to a hotel room. He was ready to tell his story
because he didn't want it to happen to anyone else. He was sure there were
kids out there being abused and he wanted them to have the courage to come
forward.

"When you're 14 going to juniors, it's like a junior going to the pros.
You're young and you're scared s--tless of life already and they just got ya
... They can do whatever they want with ya, you know?"

It had started with a sleepover at James' Winnipeg apartment and continued
until Kennedy left for the NHL. He told the reporters about how he had
nowhere to turn. "He had this whole thing planned. He knew what he was
doing. It's the way they work. He always keeps you put down so you'd always
have to look to him as the only person who could help you."

The calls for reforms and regulations were loud and clear. The Canadian
Hockey League commissioned a report on what to do. There was talk of
starting programs to help players speak out about the dressing room.
Everyone agreed that the players needed an outlet, someone they could go to
if they had a story like this. The NHL and the player's union thought they
could solve the problem with a 1-800 number.

Bill Markle, the outlaw league president, was doing some thinking, too. He
didn't think anything criminal was going on in Frost's hotel room, but he
didn't like the optics. "I'm a parent to a lot of children. I couldn't
imagine wanting my son to be in a situation where he was not with a family,"
he says.

The Hawks were ordered to find billets for Keefe, Barron and Tiveron, Markle
says. It didn't happen.

There were rumours about Room 22 and even more gossip in the dressing room.

Only the Brampton boys knew for sure. "I was old enough to know something
was going on up there and it shouldn't be going on," says Morgan Warren. "I
didn't want to be a part of it. Nothing good can come of it."

Most of the Hawks never set foot in Room 22 and the rumours remained
rumours.

- - -

On April 5, under a clear spring sky and in the middle of a playoff game,
Dave Frost punched one of the Brampton Boys, Darryl Tiveron, in the face.
Frost was charged -- and eventually given a conditional discharge -- with
assault. Much was written about the punch at the time, and since Mike
Danton's arrest the punch has been written about extensively. But the
newspaper reports and the court files don't mention all the other times the
players say Frost used violence to get results.

No one's exactly sure what game it was but Frost came into the dressing room
looking for answers. He barked a question at Jefferson but the 16-year-old
didn't say a word. He stared Frost in the eyes and kept his mouth shut. So,
the 29-year-old man punched the boy in the face, the players say.

Jefferson's head bounced off the white, cinder block wall. Players as far
away as the other side of the room heard the smack off the concrete.
Barnhardt, whose spot was right next to Jefferson, felt the vibrations run
down his back. Everyone sat in their stalls, frozen. "What do we do? Do we
step in? It was an awkward moment for everyone," Flick says. "That's
something I don't think anyone will ever forget. It was pretty sickening."
Jefferson still didn't speak up. He just kept staring at Frost. "There was
nothing said. I think we were all in shock," Corey Batten, one of the team's
goalies, says.

The police never heard about the time Frost gave Ryan Rivard a lesson in
toughness. Rivard was 15, the youngest player on the team. It was a hard
year for the boy. He wasn't getting a lot of playing time and he was far
away from his parents, who lived 41/2 hours away in the small town of West
Lorne. His father Mike, a retired Ford assembly line worker, tried to make
the drive for nearly every home game but never heard about how bad it was
for his son. Even at age 24, Rivard still doesn't want to talk about it;
"What's in it for me? Closure?" he asked the Citizen when the newspaper
contacted him in Georgia, where he was playing in the minors. "I already
have closure. It sucked."

But numerous players and the trainer say that during one intermission Frost
ordered the boy to hold his bare hands out and Frost rapped his knuckles
with the blade of a stick. The trainer grabbed a plastic baggie filled with
snow left over from the Zamboni flood and iced the boy's knuckles.

And the police didn't haul every Hawk into the station and pry this out of
them? "They didn't do anything. If the guy hits someone on the bench you'd
think they'd ask all the players what was going on in the dressing room,
too," Batten says.

Instead, the police stuck with one assault charge. Frost pleaded guilty and
was given a conditional discharge. As long as he didn't violate his
probation conditions, he wouldn't be saddled with a criminal record and
could dodge the only impediment to becoming a certified NHL agent.

- - -

The teens were in and out of the bedroom, where the girl was waiting for
them, at a steady pace. The ones who weren't having sex with the girl kept
drinking and playing a hockey video game on a Sony PlayStation. There were
about a dozen people in Room 22.

The coach denies that his players had group sex in the hotel room --
"Absolutely not" -- but some of his players say it happened.

One after another, the players entered and exited the room, Batten says. It
lasted at least an hour and the girl never came out.

Up until this night no one knew what was going on in the hotel room because
it wasn't open to outsiders. But with the season winding down and the teens
riding high after a night of boozing, the doors were wide open.

It all started at Marty Abram's house in Napanee, just down the street from
Avril Lavigne's childhood home.

As the party ended, the Brampton boys left and another group climbed into
Lloyd Marks' beatup 1984 Mercury Topaz.

It was only a 10-kilometre drive to the Bay View Inn. "It sounded like a
good idea at the time -- go over there and drink some more," Marks says.

Marks was so drunk he says he remembers almost nothing about the night, but
he says he didn't take part. LaRocque, the team's assistant captain, doesn't
recall exactly how it was organized, but by the end of the night the girl
had been alone in the room with at least half a dozen boys.

She was 17, or possibly 18.

The final laughs came when LaRocque, then 19, took a piece of paper and
wrote a contract. It stated that the girl had agreed to have consensual sex
with the players and she and the boys signed it. It's not known if a copy of
the contract still exists today.

Frost insists his players' sex lives were standard and that he wasn't
involved.

"I knew there were a lot of girls, that's par for the course in junior
hockey. There's no coach in North America who would be able to tell his
players not to get laid."

thanks for that great read but did they snowplow there to hint ,hint.

who got time to read this ?

If don't take the time to read it you are doomed to the same inexorable fate.

Wow buddy what do you do with your time?

I am an erstwhile wordsmith/coach

good for you

sweet