Tyler Brough, the new head coach of the Cariboo Cougars, is already dreaming about Sudbury.
Introduced Saturday afternoon as the successor to Trevor Sprague, who handed over the reins after guiding the Cougars to the B.C. Hockey Major Midget League championship, Brough promised he and his new assistant coaches, RJay Berra and Justin Fillion, will do everything in their power to get the team back in contention for next year's Telus Cup national championship in the Ontario city.
"The Cariboo Cougars is a program I'm very proud to be part of, a program I believe in, and a program with standards that have been set very high by Trevor and Bryan (MacLean) and the previous coaches before that and I look forward to continuing that standard," said Brough.
"The Telus Cup this year lit a bit of a fire in us and Sudbury next year is not out of the picture for us. Winning another BCHMML is on our list of to-dos and the standards will be set high with Trevor and Bryan still involved."
The coaching change was announced during the Cougars' spring tryout camp at Rolling Mix Concrete Arena. Brough says the makeup of his team next year will not resemble the big bad Cougars that struck fear into opposing teams this season, but they will have a similar work ethic.
"We've been blessed with some size and a little bit of skating the last few years with the guys we had from the north and I think next year's team will be a little bit different," he said. "We're going to be fast but we're going to be a more skilled team and we're going to be smaller. We're going to have to change our philosophy a little bit.
"Trevor set a standard here, it's northern hockey. We're from the north, we put our work boots on every day and we go to work and that's always going to be our mentality. We're always going to have a hardworking team."
Sprague will retain his duties as Cougars' general manager. MacLean, an assistant coach for 5 1/2 seasons, who moved up to head coach in 2013-14 for one season, is enrolled in a masters teaching program at UNBC, but will stay on as assistant GM.
"Tyler has done a great job with us (as an assistant coach) the last two years and I'm fully confident all three of these guys are going to knock it out of the park," said Sprague. "Tyler's details are right up there with anybody who coaches in the WHL or junior A and he wants guys who are going to come in here and work hard and compete. He demands the hard work and that's going to be beneficial to our players on being able to move them on (to higher levels) but also to his staff and whoever works under him.
"Bryan and I put in a long stretch in here and now we get to sit back to see these three guys make some magic with a good crop of kids coming in. Seeing RJay and Justin come in as alumni and put back to where they started their hockey as Cariboo Cougars is pretty exciting."
Brough has a tough act to follow. Sprague won two regular season championships, finished second five times and made the playoff final in seven of his nine seasons as head coach. That includes the league's inaugural 2004-05 season, when they were known as the Canucks. Sprague took over a fifth-place team that year with 14 games left in the season and got them into the final. He compiled a 239-69-27-0 regular season record and finished no worse than fourth place in the 11-team BCHMML.
Brough, a 38-year-old from Grande Prairie, Alta., played three seasons in the Western Hockey League as a centre for the Cougars from 1996-99 and has remained in the city ever since. He works full time as an electrician for CN Rail and he and his wife Erica have a nine-year-old daughter, Kennedy, and a four-year-old son, Hudson.
Before he joined the Cougars he won the Royal Bank Cup junior A national championship with the Fort McMurray Oil Barons and also captured the 2010 Allan Cup senior national title with the Fort St. John Flyers. Brough started coaching as an assistant with the Cariboo Cougars in 2007-08 and was also was an assistant with the Prince George bantam Tier 1 team before he came back to the major midgets in 2015.
"I'm relatively a young coach - I made the transition from a player and I still fancy myself as a player's guy," said Brough. "Along with RJay and Justin, we probably still think like a player than we do as a coach and to me that's a good characteristic to have."
Berra, 26, and Fillion, 27, are both former Cariboo Cougars who played four seasons of junior A in the BCHL for the Spruce Kings before moving on the NCAA careers - Fillion at Michigan Tech and Berra at State University of New York-Oswego and Marian University. As a coach, Fillion won back-to-back Tier 1 midget provincial titles with the Prince George Coast Inn of the North Cougars and Berra joined him this past season as an assistant to win the 2017 B.C. banner on home ice. Fillion's duties as assistant coach for Team B.C. at the men's aboriginal hockey national championship in Duncan kept him away from Saturday's news conference.
While the Cougars were dominant within their league this season, winning the regular season and playoff titles to give Sprague his first league championship as head coach, their run for national glory fell short. They finished a disappointing fifth as host team of the 2017 Telus Cup, winning just one of their five games, needing one more point to qualify for the playoff round. As the most aggressive team in the tournament, their physical style of play, a trait they reinforced throughout the season, resulted in too many undisciplined and damaging penalties. Brough plans to put a different stamp on his team.
"The style of team we had, just because we were so big and physical, we got into certain games where it benefitted us bigtime and then on the opposite side, it hurt us, and we saw that in the Telus Cup and it cost us wins," said Brough. "Discipline is big thing in hockey nowadays, obviously, and it's something we're going to have to key on. We're going to have to make sure we don't take lazy stupid careless penalties."
