By: Devan Mighton, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Lakeshore News Reporter
On Thursday, Feb. 13, the Lakeshore Canadiens Jr. C hockey club will honour the 40th anniversary of the 1984-85 Belle River Canadiens All-Ontario championship team with a pre-game puck drop celebration at the Atlas Tube Centre in Belle River.
The 1984-85 Canadiens marked the first time that the franchise struck gold. Founded in 1978, for the Canadiens, the 1984-85 season was a season of firsts – a first Great Lakes Jr. C regular season title, a first playoff championship, and the first of now six Clarence Schmalz Cups, emblematic of the top Jr. C hockey club in Ontario. The team was also the first junior hockey season for future NHLer Tie Domi, who was a ripe 15-year-old rookie at the time.
Mike Gilhuly, who is helping to organize the players for the ceremony, says he realized his team had a strong chance of doing something special about halfway through that fateful season. “Our biggest rivals were always the Essex 73’s,” recalls Gilhuly. “Every time we played Essex, it was a good game and we kind of had their number that year. We had a lot of scoring and defensive talent, and good goaltending, obviously. We knew we had a good chance if we got out of the Great Lakes because we thought the Great Lakes teams were probably some of the stronger ones in Ontario.”
The Canadiens finished their regular season with a 27-9-4 record, good enough for first place and three points ahead of Essex. In the first round of the playoffs, they swept the Leamington Flyers, followed by the Mooretown Flags. This set up what now seems like an annual tradition, a Canadiens-73’s final, but this time it was a first for the two teams. Belle River took the series in five games.
Then commenced the All-Ontario rounds, featuring the winners of the eight different Jr. C leagues from across the province. First up was the undefeated Hanover Barons of the Grey-Bruce League. They weren’t undefeated for long as the Canadiens swept them in four games. Next came a thriller that went the distance, as Belle River beat the Niagara District champs, the Stoney Creek Warriors, in seven games, capped off by a Mark Gilhuly overtime clincher at home. Soon after, the Canadiens clinched the Schmalz Cup with a fifth game victory on the road against the Georgian Bay League’s Midland Centennials.
“Honestly, we played Midland in the finals, but we had Stoney Creek in the semifinals and that should have been the finals,” states Mike Gilhuly. “We went seven games with those guys – it was back and forth, including a seventh game overtime winner in Belle River at the Old Arena.”
It was a long six-hour drive back to Belle River, but they were surprised by the townsfolk when they pulled into town at 11 pm and were given a “mini parade” back to the old Belle River Arena and greeted by the mayor at the community centre.
That year’s team featured Marcel Provonost at the helm, a former Windsor Spitfires player and coach, a 20-year veteran of the NHL, and three-time Stanley Cup champion. Gilhuly credits his knowledge of the game as a key factor for the team, as well as the camaraderie of the players in the dressing room.
“It’s been 40 years but a lot of the guys still play,” explains Gilhuly, who is forming a team alumni association with his brother, Mark, Randy Kucharski, and Marc Crevier. “The majority of the team played most of their lives together in minor hockey. To me, that was a good accomplishment for a little town. Most of the players came from the town of Belle River.”
These days, junior hockey has fairly open borders, but in 1985, your players were predominately homebrew. Players in that era had to reside between Manning Rd. and Tilbury, and no further south than South Woodslee to be rostered, although a small number of Windsor residents could be included as “imports,”
Gilhuly says that the familiarity of the players and their subsequent friendships made the team special and he looks forward to seeing his old teammates – most have committed to the event already. “It’s a good way to get a lot of the guys back together and we get to see each other,” he says. “A couple of the guys have moved out of the area and I haven’t seen them in about 35 years.”
The pregame ceremony will take place just prior to the Canadiens’ final regular season game, on Thursday, Feb. 13 at 7 pm, as they fittingly host their rivals, the Essex 73’s, at the Atlas Tube Centre in Belle River.
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