YORKTON - The Yorkton Junior Terriers are celebrating 50 years in the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League this season.
To mark the milestone Yorkton This Week is digging into its archives and pulling out a random Terrier-related article from the past five decades of reporting on the team, and will be running one each week, just as it originally appeared.
This feature will appear weekly over the entire season in the pages of The Marketplace.
Week #7 comes from 1999.
It has been a hockey season where Kelly Stoll has finally emerged into his own as a player.
“I’m doing as good as I thought I would. I started off pretty slow, but it came around,” he said.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Stoll’s Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League career had a bit of a stilted start given that last season he didn’t play competitive hockey.
Last season it got to the point where Stoll questioned whether the game was worth playing any longer. When things didn’t fall easily into place as a midget player, he made the decision to walk away from the game – at least for a season.
“I was just tired of it – tired of getting dressed every day. I wasn’t having fun anymore. I wanted to work and get on with life,” he said.
Looking back Stoll admits the year away from the ice was both a benefit and one of the toughest things he has ever done.
“I was watching my brother (Jarret) play last year and when I was watching hockey I wanted to get back and play more and more,” he said.
For Stoll, watching his little brother play meant watching a budding star in the Western Hockey League and captain of Saskatchewan’s team at the recent Canada Winter Games.
Stoll said Jarret’s success is good.
“It doesn’t bother me at all. It’s a good thing that he’s playing in the Dub (WHL) and doing well,” he said.
While he admits that he and his brother stay in touch via weekly calls throughout the season, hockey is not usually the topic of discussion when together.
While the younger Stoll continues to garner attention in the WHL, Kelly has become content as a Terrier where his work ethic has made him a fan favourite and a fixture on the team’s checking line.
“We were playing pretty good defensively as a line,” said Stoll.
Unfortunately, Stoll must use the past tense since a knee injury suffered Feb. 16, has him on the sideline until at least the end of March.
“It’s pretty frustrating always watching, especially the last couple of losses,” he said.
But Stoll is confident he’ll be back in time for the Royal Bank Cup, an affair that has grown importance over the span of the season of his comeback.
The year off made him realize he missed the competitiveness of the game, an aspect of hockey he showed throughout the off season, shining at a pair of Yorkton Terrier camps that eventually landed him as a regular with the SJHL team.
“I really didn’t know much about the Royal Bank Cup,” he said at the time, prior to fall camp.
“I just wanted to come back. As I heard more and more about the tournament it made me want to play more and more.”
The Cup also made the task of making the Terriers with a year’s rust that much tougher.
“People were telling me the Terriers would be the hardest SJHL team to make because the Royal Bank Cup was here,” he said.
And Stoll admits he didn’t exactly focus on getting into shape before camp. Fortunately, hard labor builds muscle.
“I was working at a steel plant (in Saskatoon). That kept me in half-assed shape,” he said.
In many ways the return to competitive hockey has been a process of maturity for Stoll, who part way into the current season became a father for the first time. Being a dad and playing in the SJHL is a rarity, but Kelly has handled the dual pressures well.
“He’s (Jordan Trey) four months old,” said Stoll of his son.
While a young son is a responsibility, Stoll said in some ways it has helped his hockey – even the nights of walking a crying baby.
“You get into a habit of less sleep,” he said. “On the road you don’t get as much sleep so some guys get worn out, but it doesn’t bother me as much,” he said.
In part, because of his son, Stoll’s career aspirations don’t go beyond a possible return to the Terrier line up this fall. Instead, he looks ahead to life. He is engaged to be married, an event expected before the end of the year, and he and fiancée Wendy are currently working on purchasing some farmland near Rhein.
“When I was younger my dad farmed too and I helped him on the farm,” he said, when asked why he aspired to the agriculture field.
But before he plants the next crop Stoll’s focus will remain on the ice.
The road to the Royal Bank Cup isn’t easy for any player, but for Stoll there have been some additional pressures to overcome. He admits when he skates onto the hometown ice for the games in May, it will reaffirm everything he has been through has been worth it.
“Hopefully, we get it (the championship) … We better. It will be pretty good to get a ring to show,” he said.
