It turns out winning their first provincial title in 48 years might have been the easiest part of making it to the national championships for the Burlington Blaze.
At about 10:30 Friday morning, Blaze general manager Sean Gillies got a message that the flight carrying the team's 35 players and staff was being cancelled. Their flight to Edmonton the previous day had already been delayed once due to a hail storm out West and now he had just enough time to contact everyone to stop them from going to the airport.
With a backlog of flights due to the storm, plus planes flying into Edmonton carrying evacuees from the Northwest Territories, the airport simply couldn’t handle all the air traffic.
Gillies, a sales director for a logistics supply company, is used to problem-solving.
“It’s similar what I do day to day,” he said, “except instead of freight, we had to move people.”
Gillies began looking for flights on other airlines, but they faced the same problem landing in Edmonton. Gillies thought about a charter flight, but with the team relying on fundraising to offset the cost of the trip, it wasn’t economically feasible.
At around 2:30 p.m. Friday, Casey Kiekebelt Wing, the wife of Blaze assistant coach MJ Kiekebelt, called Colleen McCourt, who handles public relations for the Canadian International Air Show. McCourt reached out to Toronto’s pro sports team, but calling late on a Friday afternoon, only got voicemail.
McCourt then called Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who put her in contact with his brother Dave, a former Air Canada pilot. Dave Hadfield called his aircraft mechanic, who suggested calling Mark Rinaldi, the president of an aircraft maintenance company.
Rinaldi told McCourt he’d make some calls. Half an hour later, just before 4:30 p.m., he called her back with a contact, Percy Gyara, the chief financial officer at Canadian Jetlines. Gyara said he had a plane available in Kitchener and McCourt put him in touch with Gillies.
“All these people with no connection to the team dropped what they were doing on a Friday afternoon to solve a problem for a local lacrosse team,” McCourt said. “It was amazing. It reminds you of the kindness of humans.”
However, even with Gyara offering the flight at cost, the 150-seat plane was still outside the Blaze’s budget.
Gillies went back to commercial airline options. With choices to Edmonton limited, he started looking at flights to Calgary. Again, finding a flight with 35 seats available proved to be challenging, but he managed to find two West Jet flights into Calgary Saturday.
It took splitting the team up on the two flights and then getting a bus to Edmonton and driving straight to the rink, but they made it just in time for their first practice.
And while Gillies said the team wasn’t at its sharpest for the opening game Sunday against the host Edmonton Miners, who went to the Minto Cup final last year, they still managed to pull off an 11-7 win.
Burlington followed that up with an 8-6 win over Calgary on Monday to clinch a spot in the semifinal. Burlington will face Coquitlam, B.C. at 7 p.m. EST today (Tuesday) with the winner advancing directly to the best-of-three final, which will start Friday.
