Goalie Wregget back in town for Kingston Greenwood Sports Hall of Fame induction
“Forty-seven, almost 50 years. It’s almost the same. This feels like it did,” said Ken Wregget, a Greenwood Bombers Squirt, Peewee and Bantam hockey player long before his 17-year National Hockey League career through the 1980s and 1990s.
Wregget was back in the Greenwood Gardens Arena October 24, checking out the dressing rooms, the bench – and plaques memorializing the 1977 and 1978 back-to-back Nova Scotia Major Bantam Championships and 1978 Maritime Bantam Championship he helped his Greenwood Minor Hockey Association team win.
“It was pretty cool to win,” Wregget said. “I didn’t realize how well we did here: I know we had fun. I was just a kid, playing hockey.”
Born in Brandon in 1964, Wregget spent his formative years in Greenwood as his family moved through his father’s Royal Canadian Air Force career. Wregget had just been learning to skate in Cold Lake, and started hockey in Greenwood at age nine as a centre, a winger and a defenceman.
“The rec centre had a used equipment sale, and I saw a size six pair of CCM goalie skates. That was it: I wanted to be a goalie.”
His father and team coaches were not fully behind the move: Wregget was the team’s top scorer and they needed him out on the ice. Wregget said his dad picked up a team so he could be a goalie, “and I ended up with the top team.”
Wregget played up, on Greenwood teams with his older brother – “a good thing for my Dad,” Wregget says, as it saved a lot of time and logistics balancing family and military responsibilities.”
He also played with the Dwight Ross School team, where many of the same Greenwood teammates boys kept up an almost four-year winning streak. Wregget returned to Cold Lake when he was 14 or 15, with a hockey-playing path ahead: he played major junior with the Lethbridge Hurricanes and was selected as the top league goaltender in 1984. He was the starting goaltender for Team Canada in the 1984 World Junior Championships. In 1982, he was drafted 45th overall by the Toronto Maple Leafs. After spending six years with the Leafs, he was traded to Philadelphia and then on to Pittsburgh. In 1992, he won a Stanley Cup with the Penguins. He played a season with both the Calgary Flames and the Detroit Red Wings. After spending 17 years in the NHL, Wregget now lives in the Pittsburgh area.
Wregget will be among the inaugural inductees October 25 in the Kingston Greenwood Sports Hall of Fame, being held at the 14 Wing Greenwood Annapolis Mess. He squeezed in the Greenwood Gardens visit, chauffeured by hall of fame volunteer Don Hyslop – once a Dwight Ross teacher who knew “this guy, basically, was a good kid” back in the ‘70s.
“You want to tell the story of how Don got you drafted to the Toronto Maple Leafs, or should Don tell it?” asked Rob Tait, a long-ago Greenwood teammate of Wregget’s who travelled for the hall of fame induction from Ottawa.
“I got detention – go figure, laughing in class,” said Wregget. Hyslop introduced him to detention hall as the “next Toronto Maple Leafs goalie.
“Fast forward to 1982, sitting at dinner with my billet family. They asked me what I thought would happen in the draft the next day: would I get drafted? Where? I guessed third round, and I didn’t know where – but likely the Toronto Maple Leafs because my Grade 8 teacher said it in detention.
“The next morning, the phone rang: ‘Yup, yup, yup…’” I hung up. Yup – third round, Toronto Maple Leafs.”
Hyslop chimed in Wregget was, in fact, the first goalie taken in that year’s draft.
“And he was a good goalie!”
Tait and Wregget laughed about their team’s first mix-and-match appearance with two-colour helmets, as two Greenwood teams’ players swapped each other blue sections for white sections, and white sections for blue sections.
“It was cool!” they agreed.
Hyslop, Tait and Wregget remember racing from Dwight Ross for after school games against West Kings or Berwick, and then getting to the Gardens for Greenwood minor hockey games that evening. Wregget, standing along the glass of the Gardens October 25, could once again see the plays and break-outs of his youth teammates.
“Way too long ago!”
Hall of Fame induction October 25 at 14 Wing Greenwood’s Annapolis mess
Also being inducted into the Kingston Greenwood Sports Hall of Fame with NHLer Ken Wregget are athletes Barbara McKeil and Gerry MacMillan; coach/ umpire Ernie Hatfield and both the 1977-79 Greenwood girls’ Bantam softball team and the 1976-79 Greenwood Bantam A Bombers hockey team.
Doors open at 6 p.m., with the ceremony underway at 7 p.m. The event is open to the public.
