I am going to turn this week's column over to Steve Blagoue...

By Steve Blagoue

In a few short weeks, the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association will crown another high school hockey champion. The newly-crowned king of the ice will likely come from a perennially successful program with great talent and a rich tradition. They will be honored by the media and their peers and deservedly so, for they will have accomplished great things that they have worked hard for all their lives. Winning the State High School Hockey Championship is a great achievement and my congratulations and respect go out to the eventual winner. But this article is not about the Team of the Year; it’s actually about the Opposite Team of the Year.

Dan Wade and his Grafton Ice Hawks recently ended their season, toiling for three months without a single varsity victory. That’s right, not a single one—winless through an entire campaign.

Years ago, when my son was very young, I coached soccer and endured my own winless season. That year, there was an undefeated team in our league, and whenever anyone asked my son how his team had done, he summed it up perfectly. “We were defeated,” he said.

Coach Dan Wade’s team may have been winless, but they were certainly not defeated. In fact, the story of Dan and his team is one of remarkable triumph against a seemingly unending litany of problems.

In a cruel portent of things to come, two of Grafton’s top players were injured before the season even started and didn’t play a single game.

“We’re a co-op,” Coach Wade explains, “and one of our star players hurt was the quarterback for Milwaukee Lutheran High School. He got hurt playing football against Grafton! We hurt our own player. We should have known then that things weren’t going in the right direction.”

And that’s exactly what happened. In just the third game on the schedule, the Hawks lost another top player when he was checked head first into the boards, breaking both wrists. Most high school teams in our state aren’t deep enough to survive the loss of three top players. As it turned out, that was just the tip of the iceberg for Grafton.

As the season wore on, two more players sustained season-ending concussions. One of them has also missed over two months of school with post-concussion symptoms.

Every hockey fan knows that the position of goalie is key to the success of the team. This year, Grafton’s senior goalie left the program to pursue a scholarship to play Division 1 Lacrosse. That left Coach Wade’s program without a single goal tender. But Grafton battled on. Sophomore Jeff Young stepped into the pads and gamely filled the role this season.

If only the saga of the Grafton Ice Hawks ended there.

Two weeks ago, the team was in a serious bus accident and two more players fell victim to injury. And finally, tragically, the team’s number-one fan, the developmentally disabled brother of senior captain Tim Grams, died unexpectedly last week. The team attended his funeral just last Sunday.

“We started with 24 players and played a lot of games with just eleven, mostly sophomores and freshman,” Wade recounted. But Wade hasn’t complained or lamented what might have been. Instead, he has soldiered on, mentoring a team that needed a leader like no other.

One of the most over-used words in sports is the word “adversity.” The word is recycled all too frequently in the trite, over-worked clichés that coaches rely on for their tired sound bites, as in “We had some adversity in the third period but were able to overcome it and win the game.”

Let’s get real here. Missing a field goal is not adversity. Letting in a goal is not adversity. Walking in a run is not adversity. And no, even losing a game is not adversity. Getting cancer is adversity. Losing your job is adversity. Parenting a troubled child is adversity. Losing your spouse is adversity. And yes, enduring a season like the Grafton Ice Hawks went through is adversity. But Wade says that the team showed a remarkable resilience, keeping a stiff upper lip and even a sense of humor through it all. “When the paramedics were treating people on our bus after our crash, the guys asked if they could put the movie back on,” Wade said.

“When it was suggested that one of the players should sell his soul to the devil for a run at the State Championship, the locker room discussion was that we’d probably need more than one to do that! When our goalie let a shot from mid-ice go in, someone on the bench said ‘I guess we have to work on cutting down shots from the neutral zone.’”

The other night, I was there to watch Grafton’s last game of the season, a 9-1 blowout loss to Fond du Lac St. Mary’s Springs Academy. I wasn’t there as a partisan but as a volunteer worker helping in the scorer’s booth and I didn’t have a stake in the success of either team.

Anybody who watched this game could see that Springs displayed great sportsmanship in their own right. Ledgers coach Ty Steffes, unlike many coaches, chose not to run up the score, sitting many of his starters while allowing his young players ample playing time.

But, as I watched this game, the Grafton Ice Hawks left an impression I won’t soon forget. At the end of a terribly miserable season, as yet another lopsided loss unfolded, I watched Dan Wade and his staff, coaching up his team until the very last whistle. I watched the Grafton players battle hard to the very end, and I watched the Ice Hawks’ fans as they applauded and supported every play. And after seeing the character that this weary, depleted squad displayed, I am compelled to ask a question. Are the Grafton Ice Hawks the Opposite Team of the Year or the True Team of the Year?

You decide.