Congratulations to Jon Cooper, the new head coach of the National Hockey League's Tampa Bay Lightning.
Not bad for a guy who's only been coaching hockey professionally for 10 years.
The 45-year-old Cooper played minor hockey in Prince George until he was 15, when he went to Athol Murray College of Notre Dame, a Catholic boarding school in Wilcox, Sask. From there, Cooper attended Hofstra University in Long Island, N.Y. on a scholarship. After getting his law degree, Cooper worked as a lawyer in Michigan for five years, until he took his first coaching job in the USHL.
His rise has been meteoric, to put it mildly.
Cooper is the only coach to ever lead a national championship winning team in all three levels of junior hockey in the United States and he did it in just eight years. He joined the Lightning's AHL farm team, in 2010 and last year, the team won the Calder Cup, the AHL championship, and Cooper earned coach of the year honours.
In other words, wherever Jon Cooper has coached hockey teams, those teams win championships.
With the firing of Guy Boucher on the weekend, the door was open for Cooper to take over the underperforming Lightning. In his time with the Lightning's top farm team, he's had the opportunity to coach its top young talent, including Brett Connolly and Dana Tyrell, both former captains of the Prince George Cougars.
Cooper has some work to do. The Lightning are next to last in the Eastern Conference, sporting a sickly 13-18-1 record heading into play last night.
If there's an Eastern Division team for local NHL fans to cheer for, it's now clearly the Lightning.
- Managing editor Neil Godbout
Meaningful energy change
British Columbians participating in Earth Hour on the weekend saved 136 megawatts of electricity. A token effort could be turned into meaningful change if Earth Hour came once a day,
During Earth Hour, British Columbians as a whole cut power consumption by 1.95 per cent.
We live in a high-tech world that depends on electricity, but that technology can help cut back on our use of electricity. For example, timers can be set to turn lights on at certain times for a set duration. Other equipment can monitor the use of electricity so we can adjust our habits to reduce consumption.
Appliances and gadgets generally consume far less electricity than they did in the past, but there are so many more of them. We take our electronic servants and toys so much for granted, it's easy to forget that they must be fed.
Awareness is growing of "vampire power" -- the use of electricity by devices that draw power 24 hours a day, even when we think they are turned off.
If you want to get an idea of how much "vampire power" is being consumed in your home, turn the lights off, then count all the little green and red eyes peering at you from dark corners, all of them constantly lapping up electricity.
Natural Resources Canada estimated that reducing the standby power consumption of all devices to one watt would save $341 million to $392 million a year in electricity bills.
B.C. Hydro's meters show how much electricity is being used, but the ordinary person can't tell at a glance what that means to the household budget.
If those meters were equipped with dollars-and-cents readouts, like gas pumps giving a running total, we would quickly find ways to be more frugal with the energy we use.
- Victoria Times Colonist
