In one: My four wild days trapped in minor-league hell with the Brampton Beast

BY SCOTT WHEELER
“How would you define in one?” I asked Brampton Beast head coach Colin Chaulk the question in his office, shortly before his team ended a brutal three-games-in-three-days road trip.

“How do you feel right now?” he said, smiling, knowing I hadn’t slept in nearly three days.

I had spent several days with the Beast over the previous three months and heard players and staff use the term in one again and again. It was their rallying cry. It carried them through their lowest points.

But it wasn’t until then — after more than 80 hours of absolute misery embedded with this last-place ECHL team — that I finally understood what it meant to be in one.

In one is a feeling. It’s the product of life in the ECHL, the low-paying, minor league two rungs below the NHL. It’s the result of sleep deprivation and road trips where everything that can go wrong does. It’s doing what you love for a fraction of what most pro players make and sacrificing everything in that pursuit.

This is the story of how I got to be in one. But it's also a story of the players whose lives never leave that state and of a team, and league, few really understand.

===

Brampton, Ont. — My journey with the Beast started in early November. They let me skate with the team before I went on the January road trip.

And the players were ready to make sure I got the full experience.

Within minutes of arriving at the Powerade Centre, I had been fined twice.

“Woah — hey now! Watch it, Scott,” the room yelled as I walked across the team’s logo to my stall ahead of practice and dropped off my bag next to the injured Tyson Wilson and defenceman Willie Corrin.

“Cellphone, Wheelsy! No phones in the room! That’s money on the board again!” shouted forward Stefan Fournier seconds later.

On a whiteboard at the end of the Beast’s room is a list of all the money players and staff owe.

Pinned on a nearby cork board was a note detailing other offences. There are fines for spitting chewing tobacco into garbage cans, not throwing away bottles of spit, breaking dress code for home games, stepping on logos, showing up late, and failing to clean the kitchen when it’s your turn. Rookies are fined if they don’t pick up pucks after practice or clean the bus after road trips.

Going to the bathroom on the bus has its price, too, a buy one get one free offer for $100.

“Stick on puck and then take the body hard with this guy,” Chaulk said, stepping into the room and pointing at me, the interloper.

By the time we took the ice, my green practice jersey hanging almost to my knees, there was no turning back. These players may be in the ECHL, but they are among the best in the world. The only way I was going to find that out was by playing with them.

Many could easily be in the AHL right now. The Beast are the lowest-level affiliate of the Montreal Canadiens, but they also serve as a destination for Ottawa Senators prospects from their own AHL affiliate in Belleville, Ont.

This season, the Canadiens have dressed six ECHL graduates (Jordie Benn, Al Montoya, Byron Froese, Brandon Davidson, Mark Streit and Torrey Mitchell). Many of the players I share the ice with believe they can follow that path.

“Don’t fuck it up, Scotty!” Chaulk yelled from across the ice, seconds before I turned the wrong way during the third drill of practice.


Out of my element and into theirs, as a member of the Brampton Beast.
I happened to join the one practice where the team hired skills coach Tim Turk to run a 40-minute session. Turk spends five seconds at his whiteboard before each drill, barking out orders and scribbling complex routes. If you don’t know what you’re doing, everyone lets you have it. I stood at the back of the line to start each drill to make sure I had it right, and I had still ruined one in my first 15 minutes.

“Let’s get after it, Scotty,” centre Alex ‘Fozy’ Foster said. “You wanted in on the action — get in on the action.”

“Let’s go bud, you’re up,” forward Jackson ‘Leefer’ Leef said during the next drill, regularly checking in on me. “You chose the wrong day, my dude.”

The second time I stopped practice was to be swarmed after I scored. I tapped in a far-pad rebound on a 2-on-1 drill with forward Brandon ‘Dickey’ MacLean. Goalie Marcus Hogberg — the player with the brightest NHL hopes on this team — probably intentionally kicked it my way, despite knowing he’d suffer jeers from his teammates.

“That’s some good change back from some of those fines!” MacLean screamed.

I’ve played hockey every week since I was six years old. Still, by the time practice wrapped up, I couldn't breathe.

This was another level. This was the pros.

Afterward, the team’s manager of hockey operations, 26-year-old Frederic ‘Freddy’ Lemay, tapped me on the shoulder and turned to the room.

“This guy probably never wants to see us again after that practice,” he said. “Woo, you chose a doozy!”

I chose the wrong road trip, too.

===

Day 1: The back of a bus headed for Allentown, PA. — On a highway in rural western New York, Andrew ‘Dags’ D’Agostini is starving.

After an 8:30 a.m. practice in Brampton, the Beast loaded their bus three hours later to depart for what should have been a seven-and-a-half-hour trip to Reading, Pa. There were going to be stops in Guelph, Ont. (to pick up a pair of players), one at the border, and another in Allentown, Pa., to pick up D’Agostini’s newest goalie partner, Patrick Spano. Spano was a Yale University grad who had been biding his time in the SPHL after spending training camp with the Beast.

But seven and a half hours passed and the sun set. The bus doesn't feel any closer to Allentown than it did an hour earlier, or the hour before that. Nobody has eaten since breakfast. Outside, what’s being called a “bomb cyclone” swirls around the traffic as the United States’ Northeast entered a deep freeze — one of its coldest weekends on record.

Players watch Coach Carter – one of five movies they’ll see before finally arriving in Reading – and gamble in a game called 7 up, 7 down. Mike Folkes, one of the team’s veterans, complains about the $40 he’s down despite winning the previous game.


A Brampton Beast’s bedroom.

Players (pictured: Jackson Leef) have to improvise to find spaces to sit on the bus.

Andrew D’Agostini added a Nintendo Switch he got for Christmas to the bus’ time-killing options.

The front of the bus.

The back of the bus.

“You guys are going to look real cool in this article playing Nintendo,” Mike Folkes said, before picking up a controller.
“Nobody will ever have a worse game than this. If I lose this one, it’s an IOU and you know I’m good for it,” he muses to teammates who insist they know he’s not good for it.

Across from D’Agostini’s broken table, which rattles and tilts, Reggie Traccitto informs the bus that he took the last water bottle.

“It’s a blizzard,” he says. “So if we get stranded, we’ll just eat the snow.”

At the front of the bus, Brandon ‘Mo’ Marino, the captain, bargains with Chaulk for a stop for food in Allentown – still three hours away – after picking up Spano, who has been waiting at a shopping mall for hours.

Chaulk wants to say yes. He’s hungry, too. But the team’s driver, Blake Outhouse — that's his real name, he’ll tell you with a laugh — can only work 10 hours, which he's already going to surpass when 9 p.m. arrives.

Once the team picks up Spano, Outhouse will have to head straight for the rink to unload crates and bags in Reading.

“You better start gnawing on your bones,” MacLean says to Marino.

D’Agostini doesn’t want to eat, but he needs to.

Earlier in the season, he was the team’s third-string goalie, as Hogberg and Montreal Canadiens prospect Michael McNiven were with the team. D'Agostini was practicing with injured players one morning when frequent healthy scratch Ian Harris curled around a cone and took a slapshot from inside the hashmarks. The shot hit D'Agostini in the mask at the perfect angle to do damage: His mouth was open, his straps snapped and the impact broke his two front teeth in half.

Even after five procedures to repair and cap his teeth, it hurts to eat.

“It was the strangest thing. But I didn’t know what (happened) until I actually put my tongue in my teeth and it was like ‘Oh my God, they’re broken.’ When it hit me I just kind of went down to my knees and I might have blacked out. I was like ‘shit, they’re gone, I’m screwed,’” D’Agostini says, using his fingers to illustrate how he had to pull one of the dangling halves off himself.

“That whole day I had to wait to go see the dentist. I just tried not to breathe through my mouth. Now looking back, I wish it didn’t hap… no, I shouldn’t say that, it builds character, that stuff. They froze my mouth and built them up a bit just to make them half presentable – and they weren’t, they were brutal. I had like 60 per cent of my teeth. Then as the procedures went on they built onto them again. They wanted to give them time just to make sure I didn’t need root canals.

“I was practicing this whole time, and it sucked, just the fear of the puck, which you can’t have as a goalie. It felt like it happened so easy — you feel like it could happen again no problem. They grinded them down to little nubs. It’s still sensitive when I clench my teeth. I don’t know how long that’s going to last.”


“In the OHL, the worst drives you have to do are a few hours for a three-in-three. It’s brutal here,” D’Agostini said.

Practice.

Preparation.

Reflection.

Fatigue.

Defeat.
Losing his teeth marked the beginning of another tough year. D’Agostini, a small goalie in a position that now favours giants, has had many over the years. As a kid, he had to go to Triple-A tournaments, practices and games whenever his dad, a self-employed contractor, had time off so that he could try to talk his way onto teams.

Eventually, he played five seasons with the Peterborough Petes in the OHL. He went undrafted, got a degree while playing at the University of Guelph and landed with the Beast in 2016. In the two seasons since, he has struggled to find playing time as the Beast have been forced to rotate in a cast of Senators and Canadiens prospects.

On days off, D'Agostini is almost always at the rink, the only healthy player on the ice with the injured group. Now 24, he still believes he can make the NHL.

“It makes for a good story. That’s the way I look at it: If I’m going to do something big in hockey, it’s going to be a hell of a story and one worth sharing. I’m hoping that one day I can inspire all of the underdogs. I’m a small guy, and I think it has been held against me a little bit for opportunities. I really do believe that if I had a couple of inches just on the stat sheet that I wouldn’t be here right now,” D’Agostini says.

“One day you’re starting seven games straight. The next day you’re the third goalie, and you’re sitting in the stands, whether you won those seven games straight or not. Making the NHL is my mindset. And I know that 99 per cent of people will tell you that’s a tough one. They might pat you on the back and say ‘Good job, maybe you will,’ but really think not a chance. I believe that one day maybe I’m going to catch a break that’s going to give me that opportunity. Until then, I’m going to keep working for it.”

If he can get his finances in order, he wants to get a master’s degree in leadership in his spare time.

But his finances aren’t in order. Last year, the Beast finished 22nd in a 27-team league in attendance, drawing a little over 3,000 fans per game. This season, a team's salary cap in the ECHL is just $12,800 a week, with a salary floor of $9,700.

When a team runs a 20-man roster, the average weekly pay per player ranges between $485 for a floor team and $640 for a spend-to-the cap roster. A player like D'Agostini, who is at the margins of the league, would be lucky to make $13,000 if he stays on the roster for every day of its 26-week regular season. Which he doesn't.

So he goes to the rink out of necessity. It might pay better for D'Agostini and others to play elsewhere, with a wealthier ECHL team where they'll get more of an opportunity, but many of them are from the Brampton area. When D'Agostini’s not at the Powerade Centre, he offers to teach at goalie clinics in his hometown of Scarborough or in Guelph.

After one practice in November, he visited his mom’s insurance brokerage for a few hours to do some data entry for her.

He can’t afford rent.

“If you get a pay cut, you don’t want to ask questions because this might be your only opportunity. I’m living out of my jeep right now,” D’Agostini says, his voice cracking as he rubbed his eyes, struggling to finish his story.

“This has been kind of a difficult year. You realize how much you can put up with when you go through these circumstances. Every day I go day-by-day. Am I going to stay in Scarborough tonight or am I going to stay in Guelph with my girlfriend? My bags are in my car all the time. That’s kind of like my room. I’ll bring them into one house or the other. I have to do laundry at the rink, pack, get them in the jeep, go there. The schedule will kind of help determine where I’m going to stay that night. It’s a juggling act. It’s a grind. But it makes you better, right?”

Eternally optimistic, he pesters Chris Ballard, then the team’s public relations coordinator and other staff for an update on setting up his “Saves for CF” campaign with the Beast. It's a charity he’d started in junior that he negotiated to continue at Guelph, one that donates a dollar to cystic fibrosis research for every save the goalies make. It’s the same campaign that earned him a segment on Hockey Day in Canada and made him the OHL’s Humanitarian of the Year in 2011.

In the parking lot outside, D'Agostini's jeep boasts a purple “cure cystic fibrosis” ribbon on its bumper.

“They’re on 20 per cent lung function — like what complaints should we ever have?” he said. “To start an initiative to try to help save these peoples’ lives is the least that we all should be doing.”

===

Back on the bus, players’ hunger has reached its tipping point. By 6:30 at night, the team’s lone NHL prospect on the trip, Cody Donaghey, insists Outhouse pull over so that he can run outside and grab another case of water.

Tired of watching movies, some of the players at the back have hooked up a Nintendo Switch and a PS4 to play video games.

Only 18 players will make this trip. Sixteen are on the bus, Spano will join the team in Allentown and Corrin will fly in at midnight from Laval — where he spent 45 days in the AHL without playing in a single game — if the airports aren’t closed due to the weather.

Only five staff travel with the Beast:

1. Chaulk, the team’s last remaining coach. They do not have a single assistant coach.
2. Ballard, who has been transitioned out of PR and into a broadcasting-only role.
3. Lemay, who does everything from video to booking hotels and meals.
4. Stixy, the equipment manager, whose real name is Shawn Smith but answers his phone as Stixy and nobody in the organization or his family calls him Shawn.
5. Tara Gilliland-Smith, the athletic therapist, and Stixy's wife.

“We’re two staff. Montreal is 16. They’ve got like eight assistant coaches,” Lemay says, shaking his head.

For the four-day trip, each player is given $78, which is expected to cover all of their costs and food. On this day, buying anything hasn't been an option.


The riches of the road: $78. Rookie Cody Donaghey and former Toronto Marlies captain Alex Foster share a room when the team stays in a hotel. Foster played three games with the Maple Leafs in 2007-08.
After seven hours, the only food on the bus — candy that Outhouse stocks in a bowl at the front — runs out.

“Holy fuck Blake, the candy canes don’t restock themselves,” Chaulk jokes, trying to lighten the mood.

Near the front, a group of players have given up on passing the time and decide to turn their tables into beds, a jigsaw puzzle that requires a four-man effort to complete.

“Didn’t you take a summer course on this,” Foster says to Donaghey as he examines the table in his hands.

“The 20-hour trip we did once wasn’t as bad as this,” Donaghey chimes in during the shuffle.

“Yeah because we stopped for the night,” forward Chris ‘Levs’ Leveille responds.

A few seats down, Stixy wonders aloud if the 46 different players the team has used so far this season will continue to grow and break a record the Beast set previously (76 players in a season). Spano is going to be the sixth goalie to rotate through No. 34, the jersey the team designates to its last-minute call-ups.

“The hardest thing is recruiting players,” Chaulk explains. “I feel like I’m not even coaching sometimes; I’m just running a roster. It’s like it could be a month you’re out and then ‘Okay, you’re in the top-six now.’”

The front of the bus pops and begins to shake.

“The windshield wipers are fucked, and we can’t stop,” Outhouse yells.

This is Outhouse’s fourth year driving the Beast. He’s a caricature: gruff and burly, with slicked-back red hair, a goatee, a tucked-in white dress shirt and tinted glasses. He and the players always seem at odds, but it’s a love-hate relationship.


“It’s fine when everyone toddles along. It’s when you get the one hero in his all-wheel drive who spins out and closes down the highway.” – Blake Outhouse
That morning, when the team decided to push the bus’ departure from 11 to 11:30, Outhouse warned them about the weather and what that could mean.

In the off-season, Outhouse gets the bus rewrapped so he can drive it for a series of eight NASCAR tours. It is a family business, one that his dad ran for 40 years, driving and wrapping buses. Now his son runs it back in Chatham, Ont., while he drives.

He has learned to hate most of the other drivers on the road.

“Why can’t we play hockey in July?” he says, going only 45 miles an hour on the freeway and looking out at the slushy roads in front of him. He points to the driver in his rear-view mirror who is holding up traffic because he is afraid to pass.

“It’s going to be a long weekend. He’s freaking me out. I don’t like being in the mountains when it’s like this.”

When Outhouse gets passed, the players complain.

“He’s carrying cardboard boxes — I’m not,” he’ll frequently reply.

Outhouse does this for months, sitting in solitude and darkness for hours on end, quietly playing whichever country music station he can find on the dial and keeping track of the winter snow warnings down the coast.

“It’s something to do,” he says, before the conditions get so rough that Lemay has to get off of the bus on the coldest day of the year to pull the wipers across the windshield himself. Winds are approaching 40 miles per hour — nearly as fast as the bus' top speed.

It takes only an hour for the smells in the bus to get trapped. The blame this time seems to go to Matt ‘Gravy’ Petgrave, who some refuse to sit next to. By hour 10, the air feels toxic.

When the bus finally arrives at Santander Arena — after an hour-long detour to Allentown — it has been 11 hours since anybody ate.


Always the first on the bus, nothing bothers Chaulk more than players arriving late. Outhouse has been known to leave without them.

Unloading takes everybody.

… No matter how late or cold it is.

Stixy wastes no time.
The team is greeted in Reading by the last remaining rink staffer, who gives them the key to their room while Outhouse blares his horn to signal to be quick. Players rush in sweats and sweaters during minus-30 Celsius temperatures to set up the room for the next morning. Outhouse calls a nearby mechanic to find out if he can fix the wipers on short notice.

The Beast wanted to stay at the host hotel, the DoubleTree by Hilton near the rink, but they couldn’t afford the $176 cost for each of their 14 rooms. Instead, they stay at the Crowne Plaza, which is near the city outskirts.

By the time the bus pulls into the hotel, all the nearby restaurants are closed. Only the Applebee’s around the corner, which was set to close in minutes, at 10 p.m., is still open and able to take more than a dozen last-call orders.

Two years earlier, at the same hotel, the city was dumped with 36 inches of snow in 24 hours and the Beast was stranded for five days. Eventually, the hotel ran out of food. They gave away free alcohol while they waited for the military to make a trip to Walmart.

“This is the worst fucking town to get to. All the other ones have highways in,” Stixy says to Outhouse before leaving the bus.

“This city sucks,” he replies. “That’s life on the road.”

===

Day 2: Reading, Pa. – There is one player on the Beast roster whose path to sitting inside the Crowne Plaza lobby at 9:30 a.m. on Jan. 5 is unlike any other.

In the summer of 2016, after spending parts of eight seasons bouncing between the SPHL, the Federal Hockey League (the northeast’s lowest level of pro, where a team’s weekly salary cap is $5,000), and Allan Cup Hockey (a Canadian senior league), Chris Leveille attended the Beast’s free agent camp.

The camp is a formality every mid-level pro team uses as an exercise in making money. The Beast charge participants $300, and it’s not uncommon to find plenty of beer league players who think they can make the ECHL. The Beast can typically get 80 people to attend, earning them an easy $24,000.

It’s a money grab — not a serious search for talent.

Leveille spoke with Chaulk ahead of the camp about how dominant he had been in other pro leagues, but the head coach didn’t really give his resume a look.

“I knew my speed would differentiate me from everybody out there,” Leveille said from his chair in the hotel lobby. “Chaulk ended up inviting me to main camp. It was just the right place, right time and a coach that gave me a chance.”


Chris Leveille.

Late at night (and into the early morning), Chaulk apologizes to Leveille for benching him in the second period of their last game and the pair review his shifts.

“Is that a picture book?” Foster said to Leveille of his reading habit.

‘Levs’

From men’s senior hockey to the Beast’s first line.
Early on, he took a job from one of the team’s regulars. By year’s end, he was one of Brampton’s leading scorers and a staple on its top line. This year, he sits second in team scoring, at a nearly point-per-game pace.

His path isn’t the only thing about him that’s unique. His ambitions are, too. Now 30, Leveille has no interest in progressing past the ECHL. He lives in Guelph so that he can split taking care of his six-year-old son with his ex.

He told Chaulk that if he’s ever traded he’ll probably stop playing.

“I’m pretty content here. I see Willie (Corrin) just went up there (to the AHL). He just practiced the whole time and lived in a hotel. You don’t want to do that. I love it here. We’ve got a good group of guys, and I play so it’s fun,” he said. “You get some days that are just like ‘Oh my God, what are we doing?’

“But I can sleep on the bus. The guys at the back that sit and play cards all night, it’s like 'Holy, how do you do that?' It’s tough. People don’t even understand what this league is.”

That night, against Reading, Leveille gets to have the highlight of his career. He plays against James De Haas, his cousin.

Moments like that are enough for a player like Leveille, who used to play Jr. B.

“Stuff like this, you couldn’t find this anywhere,” he said.

Beyond the beard, the shaved head, the tattoos, the beanie, the constant playful trash talking, and the rough-around-the-edges exterior, is a man who prefers the solitude the road offers.

On the bus, when he’s not yelling at someone, he’s reading Love, Freedom, Aloneness: The Koan of Relationships by Osho, an Indian guru.

===

“Why isn’t the bus warm, Blake?” Leveille asks sarcastically as he steps up the stairs out of the deep freeze ahead of the team’s morning skate.

Stixy reminds Outhouse to lock the bus while he waits at the rink and tells the players to be careful. According to the 2010 national census, Reading is the poorest city in America, with nearly 50 per cent of children living in poverty.

In recent years, there have been shootings outside the rink while the team played and brawls at their hotel.

“Oh, it’s bad out there,” Stixy says.

When the players arrive at the rink, there’s nobody there to let them in. They have to call Chaulk, who always leaves before the bus and finds his own way to the rink, to open the doors.


Unlike many other ECHL teams, the Beast can’t afford to fly everywhere — and take just one team flight a year. This is their second home.

“I can’t wait until they retire your number at Ricoh Coliseum,” Donaghey said, jokingly of how old he is, to Foster.

Locked out, the players huddle outside the arena doors in the cold.

Nathan Todd, between periods.

Willie Corrin and Reggie Traccitto talk strategy during the intermission.

At 21, Donaghey is the youngest player on the team.
Predictably, the morning skate is slow. Chaulk tries to keep the tempo up by having a rule that players can’t touch the pucks in between drills. (He alone will have to gather them to set up the next one.)

Chaulk barks at his tired team, telling them they're allowed to talk to each other.

At Santander Arena, the road team is given four small rooms with doors that open into each other. The players share two, Lemay and Chaulk get another, and Gilliland-Smith sets up her tables in the last. There are no benches or stalls, so players sit on plastic chairs.

Stixy, the players joke, is the epitome of an equipment manager. He has worked more than 900 games across just about every pro league in North America below the NHL.

He complains about things like the craftsmanship of the league’s jerseys. Everyone in the Beast office seems afraid of him. But he’s also beloved and excellent at his job.

Tall, with his head shaved and a deadpan look that sends a message, he’s armed with scissors, a towel over his shoulder, flip flops for the day, boots for games (to avoid getting stepped on), and a fanny pack. When a player’s stick breaks, he doesn’t even have to look at the rack to know which one he’s grabbing. He spends all day — and often all night if there isn’t an overnight bus trip — cleaning and drying the players’ gear in cash washing machines. He sews all their jerseys, repairs gloves that rip open, sharpens skates and prepares the dressing room.

On ECHL benches that are often too small for modern pro teams, he squeezes past players to replace broken blades and sharpen skates.


Stixy.

The deadpan.

Jack of all trades, master of none.

Tara Gilliland-Smith.

Gilliland-Smith stretches Leef. “Aren’t you glad you came on this trip,” she says to me sarcastically.

Gilliland-Smith and Traccitto.
Gilliland-Smith is different. Quiet and reserved, she sticks to herself on the bus and is often among the first to climb into her bunk to try to sleep. She refuses to give the players ammonia inhalers — the smelling salts many now use in the NHL — but carries a plastic briefcase full of drugs, wraps, bandages, tools, and even lip chap, which comes in handy for irritated players during their coldest weekend in memory.

Before and after every skate, practice, workout and game, there’s a lineup of players in her room, waiting for new tape or ice. Nearly every player has a shoulder, ankle or knee problem that needs treating daily, and it’s her job to stretch all of them.

Stixy and Gilliland-Smith met in Amarillo, Texas, with a team in the now-defunct Central Hockey League and have since made pit stops in Abbotsford, Niagara, Rapid City, Kalamazoo, and Fort Erie, among others. With the Beast since inception in 2013, the couple is in tune with everything that goes on in the league, aware of the teams that are struggling financially.

They're well-connected aids for Chaulk.

“If I had my way, I’d retire here, but this business, man,” Stixy says before telling Chaulk he forgot to give him a day’s worth of his laundry per diem.

On what they joke is “less than McDonald’s money,” Stixy and Gilliland-Smith are often away from their kids, who live with other family members for weeks at a time. They spend the season saving for their summer tradition — Disney World — which is payback to their kids for months away.

“I bribe them when they get sad when we leave by saying ‘You like when we go to Disney every year don’t you?’” Gilliland-Smith said, looking over photos of last year’s trip.

===

Down a different purple-painted cement hall, Brandon Marino looks back on his own one-of-a-kind career path.

At 31, Marino is a star in the ECHL, with more than a point per game over the course of his eight years playing in its different iterations. But his chance to play in the AHL has passed him by. Last year, he was given a 30-game stint with the Utica Comets and posted four goals in 30 games on the team’s fourth line.

After spending 2014-15 playing in Hungary, he’s only in Brampton because it was Chaulk who called and asked him to return when he took over as head coach and VP of hockey operations.

In 2013-14, they played together on the Fort Wayne Komets' top line in Chaulk's last season playing in the ECHL.

Marino knows where he’s at. His wife came with him to Brampton, and he’s happy remaining with the Beast if he’s playing a major role — a decidedly different mindset than the rest of the league’s players.


Brandon Marino is always the last man on the ice.

A second coach?

“When Mo knocks on my door asking for something, I almost never say no. But the rest of you aren’t shit. It might be your agent, it might be you’re too slow, somebody might have fucked you over.” – Colin Chaulk
Given where he came from, his career will be considered a huge success.

Marino grew up playing roller hockey in California in the Wayne Gretzky era, when ice rinks and hockey programs first began popping up. Now a certified strength and conditioning coach, he returns home in the summers to train young players trying to follow his path. Within half an hour from his California home, there are now 10 rinks.

Passionate and serious, he acts as a pseudo-coach in the Beast dressing room. Marino has a brilliant mind for detail, video, and systems.

He cares about his teammates, on a personal level, knowing how hard life in the ECHL can be.

“You do have to talk to guys to say ‘Get your head in it’ or ‘Hey, you’re going to have bad days’ and be there for him. I think that’s what gets lost in pro sports a lot of the time: We’re all people. We come from different backgrounds. Everyone’s different,” he said.

“It’s a mindset. If you embrace it and know what you’re in for and take things with a grain of salt, you can do it. If you focus on the little things that could be better or could be different, it’ll eat you. We’re not making millions, and we don’t have resources, but you’re playing hockey.

“Whenever I have a day like that where it’s like ‘Man, what am I doing?’ I think, well I’m doing what I’ve been doing since I’m five years old and I have a lot of friends who are working 9-to-5 jobs, they get maybe their two weeks’ vacation and that’s it. I could be doing something else that I really don’t enjoy.”

===

Adrenaline. The overwhelming smell of coffee. And anticipation. It all fills the Beast dressing room before game time.

In between treatment, tins of chewing tobacco, and protein shakes, players pause to check out the local pizzeria’s menu and place their orders for postgame meals, putting their money in a paper cup and retreating for their pregame routines. Some find solitude in the hallways, stretching and listening to music. Others group together for a game of keep-up with a soccer ball.

Players are called into the coach’s room shortly after 5 p.m. Lemay has set up a scouting video of the Royals — the ECHL affiliate of the Philadelphia Flyers — and prepared tape for each of the power-play units from their previous game. Chaulk points to Reading’s threats and goes over their breakouts before updating new players on systems.

They used to travel with a TV, but it didn’t make sense. They now find the nearest white wall to set up a projector. The room is crowded and quickly smells.


Corrin struggles with the smells of the road.
When the software stutters, Lemay gets the brunt of it.

“Fucking rights, Freddy. You had one job, Freddy,” MacLean chips in.

“It’s all right — I didn’t want to warm up or anything,” Folkes adds.

Chaulk doesn’t like to run video meetings for more than five or six minutes, aware he quickly loses guys if it runs much longer. But today it pushes 20 minutes thanks to technical problems.


Chaulk: “Bumps and jumps. Deny the top on the PK.”
After the group leaves, MacLean and Foster grab a whiteboard to go over questions with Chaulk. This goes on and on, with a different cast of players rotating in with ideas or for one-on-one looks at their previous game’s shifts.

Many inform Ballard or Lemay of assists or goals the league has missed recently — a huge problem in the ECHL. The new additions ask if they can get their Elite Prospects stats page updated.

ECHL officials come and go making sure Lemay can tap into the game’s video feed and record it.

When warmups roll around, MacLean — the most talkative guy in the room – has a pregame celebration for every player.

“Gravy, you fucking all-star. Let me see it tonight. Fozy, we’re making plays out there today. Couple of clicks for Dags!” he shouts.

The rest of those in the room start snapping their fingers.

Around the corner, Chaulk lets the players get each other going before making his entrance to announce the starters, the team’s most important ritual. This time it has a twist.


“Alright, let's fucking get’er done here for Scotty,” Chaulk said to the room.
“Dags, you fucking ready? You’re starting. I know you all fucking think we’re in one after the bus ride yesterday because we are but we have to fucking outwork them so I want to hear 'outwork' instead of 'in one' for each starter tonight boys! Dunny!” Chaulk yells.

“Outwork!

“Dickey!”

“Outwork!”

And on and on it goes.

Above each player’s head, their nameplates read “Wives and refs are in charge, not you.” On the bench, however, they spend most of the game yelling at the officials. There is only one referee per game in the ECHL, and he’s normally baby-faced and inexperienced.

An arena that once routinely sold out is now three-quarters empty on a Friday night. Once a game, the Royals’ mascot hangs a “got hemorrhoids?” T-shirt on the glass behind an opposing player.

Despite outshooting the Royals, the Beast trail at intermission. The dressing room is silent before Foster and MacLean speak up.

“Good kicking Dags — we’ll get that one back for you,” MacLean says to his goalie.


Luc-Olivier Blain finds peace in the hallway.

Details, details, details.

When there’s only one coach, everyone has a say.

Pre-game special teams review.

Patrick Spano was called in to sit on the bench for three days.

Spano stands for the national anthem.
In Gilliland-Smith’s room, Nathan Todd lies on the ground and rests his feet on the counter, a routine he says makes him feel light. He doesn’t know if it works.

Outside, players leave their wet gloves for Stixy to dry between periods while Lemay rushes down from the press box to set up his laptop, turn off the lights, and run some of the lowlights — he has all the turnovers cut and queued up — for Chaulk.

The coach pores over the videos, occasionally calling in players to explain their mistakes. Lemay gives him an update on the numbers he tracks for every game, from retrieved chips to recovered rebounds and Grade A scoring chances.

“Back it up a bit again. Stop it. Jesus,” Chaulk says to Lemay before leaving to deliver his speech before the third period.

“You keep pushing forward. You’re either driven or you’re not. You’re one per cent of the guys that make it to this level as is,” Chaulk tells the room, knowing they’ve been the better team.

It doesn’t matter. The Beast give up a late goal and lose 3-2.

The silence is restored after the game.

===

The front of a bus headed for Glens Falls, NY. – That game is just the beginning. The nearly 12-hour bus ride on Day 1 was, too. Loading the bus in minus-30 temperatures at 10 p.m. ahead of a six-hour overnight ride to Glens Falls for a game against the Adirondack Thunder the next evening turns silence into anger.

Vince Dunn, just demoted from the AHL's Belleville Senators, handles the team’s toughest road trip of the year the worst. He shakes his head and sighs when the lights on the bus don’t work. He complains that he can’t go to Europe because he’s not a scorer. He was a fifth-round pick of the Ottawa Senators in 2013, but has spent most of the last three seasons bouncing between the AHL and ECHL.

The shortest distance the Beast travel in a season — six hours to Toledo — is the longest trip of Belleville’s year. He lets the bus know. He complains when Luc-Olivier Blain throws pucks into the stands during warmup because the Beast don’t have many to begin with. He reminisces about how nice his house was in Belleville.

Chaulk and the staff frequently discuss how they can help him get out of this rut.

“Who would ever want to live here? Look at this place,” Dunn mumbles to himself, looking out the window as the bus rolls away from the curb. He turns to Stixy.

“Call the league and tell them we don’t want to play. There no way this trip should be allowed,” he says, grimly.

The players’ pregame pizza orders await them on the bus, but they’re cold. While everyone eats, Dunn tries to find a stream of the world junior gold-medal game so he can watch on his iPhone.

Near the front of the bus, Lemay and Ballard dig through cables to see if they can hook up a phone to the TV system. By some miracle, they do, and the game helps ease the silence.

“If I go over on my data I’m billing all of you!” Ballard shouts.


Vince Dunn, Jackson Leef, Alex Foster and Cody Donaghey watch the final minutes of the gold medal game at the world juniors.
Donaghey and Dunn discuss just how good their sort-of Senators teammates Alex Formenton and Drake Batherson have been. The others drool over projected 2018 first overall pick and Team Sweden star Rasmus Dahlin.

When the game ends and the team’s Canadian players are done celebrating, they’re reminded of the bus smell and the sleepless night in front of them.

“It’s like a legit sewer system in here,” Leveille says, blaming Petgrave.

“I have feelings, too,” he responds.

By 11 p.m., some at the front of the bus have begun to turn tables into bunk beds. The back of the bus retreats to gambling, movies and video games.

Climbing into the top of three bunks is no small task. There’s little more than a foot of space between each of the red or blue plastic-cushioned benches turned beds. During the daytime, the top bunks are filled with bags, blankets, and pillows, all of which end up on the dirty floor, alongside boots and coats when a player tears them down to climb up.

Without boots, feet grow cold. Between the front and the back of the bus, there is no storage — just a bathroom, a microwave and a small fridge that needs to be taped shut. Claustrophobia is not an option. If you’re broad shouldered, neither is sleeping on your side.

The plastic is cold and sticks to the players' skin.

It’s windy and the bus sways. There are grips on the walls of the bus for players and staff to grab onto to avoid falling out of their narrow bunks. Near the back of one of the tires, something is broken and it rattles violently. Garbage bins overflow and spill when Outhouse rounds a corner.

At 1 a.m., when most of the bus has begun to settle, Outhouse pulls into a truck stop so he can go to the bathroom. Everyone begins to stir again, stumbling through the pitch black to find their boots and sprint, hands tucked into sweater sleeves, through the bitter cold for snacks.

By the time the bus pulls into Cool Insuring Arena in Glens Falls at 3:26 a.m., players are lucky if they’ve had an hour of sleep. It’s time to unload again before arriving at the Queensbury Hotel just after 4 a.m.

It is so cold the players who put their luggage below the bus can’t get their bags. The doors have frozen shut, and Outhouse doesn’t want to get off of the bus to help.

“This is why when the Leafs complain about back-to-backs, I just laugh,” Chaulk says.

He and Lemay haven’t slept. They can’t afford to. Overnight bus trips mean overnight video review. The pair has to watch back every shift, track events, and cut dozens of sequences for the next day’s video session. Because video is scheduled for noon and the team was on the bus while Adirondack played, Lemay can’t get a couple of hours of sleep at the hotel either. He has to watch Adirondack's game and prepare the tape.

Insomnia comes with the territory.

“Freddy’s got the fucking Holiday Inn Express, and I’m the Ritz Carlton,” Chaulk jokes of the table they share on the bus, which is scattered with their laptops, detailed notebooks, and sticky notes.

Neither of them want to be in the ECHL, but they have to start somewhere. They know several NHL coaches — including Bruce Boudreau, Peter Laviolette, Glen Gulutzan and Jared Bednar — took this path to the top.

“There’s too many hats to wear, but if you want the players to believe you, you have to have firm stuff,” Chaulk says, knowing he has to be prepared for every practice, video session and game.

He has pity for Lemay, who does everything he can’t do in his 24-hour days.

“I’m on the phone all the time and I’m a mess, but there’s shit work in every job you do. If you lose your job here, you’ve got to start from the bottom somewhere else, pushing papers. Freddy — this guy has a million jobs. Video coach and meal guy. If they get the chicken wrong, he hears about: ‘I said one sauce not two sauces Freddy!’”


“Freddy, I have three goals already. Three.” – Mike Folkes to Frederic Lemay at morning skate.

“We can’t score goals,” Frederic Lemay says between periods. “We can and we will, Freddy,” Colin Chaulk responds.

Freddy never stops.

“Stats are for losers unless you have them,” Chaulk often tells his players during practice.

A one-man bench.

Chaulk draws up a last-minute play.
Chaulk has been doing this for 20 years. A star in junior in Kingston, he was never drafted. He spent years bouncing around — playing for teams like the Austin Ice Bats, Tallahassee Tiger Sharks, Jacksonville Lizard Kings and Colorado Gold Kings in various leagues — before settling at the end of his career in Fort Wayne for 10 seasons.

He won five championships there. When they retired his number, they raised his banner upside down. After a 15-year playing career, he came back to the ECHL as a coach in Fort Wayne before bouncing to Kalamazoo and now Brampton.

He does it because there's nothing else. This is all he knows — and quitting means starting from the bottom in another field.

Lemay's experience, meanwhile, is limited. He graduated from Brock University's sport management program in 2015, then spent a season as an intern in Hamilton with the AHL's Bulldogs. That franchise relocated after his first season, so he went to St. John’s with it for two seasons, before the team relocated again.

His title in Brampton is, technically, manager of hockey operations. He’s not yet helping Chaulk behind the bench, but he promises to get there someday.

They both know they're a long way from the NHL.

“The drop off, salary-wise, is gross,” Chaulk says. “League minimum is $460 a week. Our highest paid player is like $35,000. When it comes to recruiting, it can be impossible because it’s 'Is he a good hockey player and is he from the GTA?' We’re 0-12 against Orlando since I started because they have 10 guys on AHL one-way deals (from the Leafs). But we do all of the same things — just with less people. The base should be a little bit higher.”

Until last season, the Beast played games against a team in Elmira, N.Y. — a four-hour drive — a half a dozen times a year. It made the travel bearable because it was the only stop the team could turn into a one-day trip. Elmira has since folded, and Chaulk insists this year's travel is his worst in two decades.

Leef, one of the team’s newcomers, attended Chaulk’s hockey camp in Fort Wayne when he was 10 years old. After growing up in Indiana and playing hockey in Massachusetts, Texas and Iowa, he's still adjusting to life in the ECHL.

Unlike in the AHL, there’s a roster limit — and his stay may be brief.

“If we get a guy (from Ottawa or Montreal), I have to say to Leef 'We can’t keep you.' And I love Leef. And then two days later our guy goes back up, and we’re begging Leef to come back (from another league),” Chaulk says.

Chaulk's family often ask him what he does and if he gets paid for it. When he used to run camps in Fort Wayne, he'd work 20 hours a week, and the local rink manager wouldn’t understand why he had to leave for a pre-game nap.

“He’d say ‘Well why can’t you work from 8-5 here and then just go to the rink after that for your game?’ and I’d say ‘Well how do you feel after your day in the office from 8-5? Do you feel like going and running around and chasing vulcanized rubber for three fucking hours? And if you don’t get it, by the way, your contracts are 24 hours so your coach calls you in the next day and says ‘Hey thanks for your hard work, but we’re going to release you today.’

“Even my close family, they don’t even understand. The best example is that it’s no different from the NHL, just the pay cheque’s a little different. Freddy loves it because he wants to be a GM. He loves the fact that if the player’s really a problem, you can just pay him today and that’s it. But you don’t want to create too much fear in your work environment because if you feel like you’re going to be fired every day that’s obviously not a good feeling.”

Chaulk is fascinated by what other coaches do. He believes the Pittsburgh Penguins have mastered development with their three-tier system in Wilkes-Barre and Wheeling. Because he played in the league so long, he understands what the players are going through better than most. He’s forgiving with the players, incapable of being mad if his team loses a game after arriving at the hotel at 4 a.m. the night before.

“I try to talk more about what kind of man and father and husband than about Xs and Os,” he said. “I have to get to know them one-on-one. If I’m an asshole and I ask them to do all these things for a fraction of what they’re worth, it’s not right. I just can’t tell them to do this and that and then go home and say ‘Hi, honey.' You can’t be two different people. In the ECHL, teams want to make money and win a Kelly Cup more than develop players. They want to survive. What I’m saying is I don’t care that much about wins.”

The Beast finished dead last in the Eastern Conference in 2015-16, Chaulk's first season as head coach. They made a run to the second round of the playoffs last season, but sit near the bottom of the standings again this year.

===

Day 3: Glens Falls, NY. – Cool Insuring Arena, or the Glens Falls Civic Centre, is a 4,700-seat rink in a community of a little more than 14,000 in upstate New York.

It’s a quaint old town with four-storey buildings. The Queensbury Hotel, once a grand 1920s destination, is now a fading pit stop for tourists bound for nearby ski slopes in the winter and Lake George in the summer.

Cold fronts from Canada can make it one of the coldest places in the northeast in the winter.

On Jan. 5, 2018, it breaks a record low, with wind chills in the minus-40s. Just in time for the Beast to arrive.

Inside the arena, a brand new jumbotron, courtesy of hosting last year’s all-star game, is surrounded by a rink ill fit for professional hockey. Its worn green seats are on a steep incline. There is no real concourse.

It’s the coldest rink in the league on its best day and struggles to keep fans and players from freezing on its worst. You can see your breath. The Zamboni enters at centre ice, splitting the two team benches, which their dressing rooms don’t have access to. Even with only three forward lines, there’s no room for Stixy and Gilliland-Smith on the bench, and Chaulk doesn’t have space to move beyond a small square.

Adirondack Thunder fans are an older demographic. Elderly men wearing fedoras mingle in the stands and everyone knows everyone. They’re loud and they love a big hit. Their go-to chant is ‘Hey, you suck!’ and at the start of each period, they organize a Viking clap.

Now the affiliate of the New Jersey Devils, the Thunder still boast their old Calgary Flames colours. The away dressing room is down the hall from the nearest showers, and the coach’s room struggles to accommodate the small team for pre-game video. The ceilings are low in the hallways, and pre-game keep-up soccer takes tiles and lights as casualties.


The pre-game ritual.

Oops.

Damage done.

Before the game, players place their pizza orders for after it.

Colin Chaulk reviews Vince Dunn’s shifts.

“The reffing is brutal. We know that. But what you need to do is muck it out. I’m not going to get in your face and tell you how bad you are.” – Colin Chaulk
By game time, players are running on any sleep they could get between 12:30 p.m. video and a 4:30 p.m. bus to the rink.

Wearing their faded red workout gear, the players are putting new laces in their skates when Chaulk enters for a brief speech.

“Travel. The coast. It sucks. Embrace the grind. One fucking year I didn’t make the playoffs. Never again,” he says.

To lighten the mood, the coach jokes that he may put Paul ‘Chinner’ Cianfrini and Folkes, the team’s two stay-at-home defencemen, on the power play.

“They hate us ‘cause they ain’t us, Folkesy,” says Cianfrini.

“I either shoot the puck looking down or I don’t shoot it looking up. You guys pick,” Folkes adds.

His teammates respond with a chorus of “Don’t shoot it!”

Then, as always, it’s MacLean’s turn. He goes around the room asking each player if they're tired.

“No,” they lie.

“Then fucking prove it to me,” he replies to each.

“IN ONE!” they shout back.

===

“I wonder what will kill us first — the fumes or the hypothermia,” Gilliland-Smith says as the players load the bus and cough after dropping another one-goal game, 2-1 to the Thunder, despite outshooting their opponent again.

The bus’ generator has broken down, and Outhouse has been forced to run the engine for the better part of four hours. For a couple of reasons. The first is that it is so cold he fears the bus may not start if he turns it off. The second is that he needs to try and heat it for the players, who desperately need sleep for the eight-hour trip back to Brampton in time for their third game in three days.


The temperatures dropped so far that even the rink couldn’t fight back.

After idling for several hours, the air outside the bus is thick with diesel.

Another sleepless night.

Reggie ‘Bro’ Traccitto and his ‘accessory’.

The fight for warmth.
It is so cold outside the heat, which runs up and down the sides of the inside of the bus behind the beds, is ineffective. And the bus has been idling and pumping diesel for so long in the parking lot that it is filled with the fumes.

It only takes a few breaths before throats start to scratch and tighten, appetites for the waiting cold pizza are lost, and throbbing headaches or nausea set in.

“I can’t eat — I feel like I’m sucking in diesel,” Blain says, while MacLean and Folkes insist on opening some windows once the bus gets moving, heaters be damned.

The looming trip home from Glens Falls is the worst yet. Not only will sleep be impossible for the second straight night, but the team won’t arrive at the Powerade Centre until 6 a.m.

They are scheduled to play at 2 p.m. that day.

To stay hydrated, the team ultimately places frozen water bottles along the heat vents to thaw, preferring the cold to going without fluids.

“My boy’s going to ride the bus!” MacLean shouts to the tune of Tom Cochrane’s hit song Big League, taking a few artistic liberties with the lyrics. His scarf is pulled over his face and his jacket hood pulled tight, revealing only his eyes.

At the front of the bus, Petgrave huddles under a blanket on his phone. Forward Scott Jacklin informs Chaulk that he’s learned his wife’s grandfather has passed and asks if it’s okay if he catches a 9 a.m. flight to Vancouver and misses the game.

“It’s times like these you’ve just got to put family first,” Chaulk says, before confirming with Outhouse that the bus will arrive in Brampton with enough time for Jacklin to make it to the airport.


“Fuck I hate when my hands are cold.” – Matt Petgrave
It is officially the coldest day of the year. The players hang on to one another to get through the bus ride home.

“This is the hardest league to play in. People don’t have a clue how hard this is,” says David Vallorani, a 28-year-old forward who has played in the NCAA, Italy, Germany and Sweden in recent years.

“Put Sidney Crosby on this bus and see how he performs,” MacLean says. “He’d still be sick — but you know what I mean.”

By 1:30 in the morning, after three and a half hours on the bus, some players start to crawl into their frozen bunks, jackets still on and cold air leaking out of the windows and up their spines. Their pillows taste like gasoline.

One foursome begins playing FIFA '18 on PS4, despite the fact it'll mean they get no sleep.

Just after 4 a.m., the bus rolls to a stop at the border. Everyone climbs over garbage and coats to run inside and go through customs.

After, there’s no point trying to sleep for the remaining portion of the trip from Niagara Falls to Brampton.

In the silence, Jacklin speaks up, showing Folkes his phone.

“Someone wants me to play in Australia. Look at this: They give you a $100 meat pack per week,” he says.

“Did you hear that boys, a $100 meat pack!” Folkes shouts, the sleep-deprived bus laughing back.



===

Day 4: Brampton, Ont. – Without sleep, the days blend together.

After a 6 a.m. arrival, some players head for breakfast nearby to kill time. Others head home to shared apartments. They'll try and sleep for an hour or two before returning to the Powerade Centre.

The rink is built of grated tin and looks considerably older than its 1997 construction would suggest. It functions as a broader community centre for the city, with three pads of ice. Beyond cracked windows in the Beast’s office, a bucket sits to catch water from a leak in the roof.

During intermissions, a shoulder-mounted plastic hot dog gun is stuffed with tin foil-wrapped hot dogs to be fired into the crowd. In the dressing room, practice jerseys hang next to the toilet in the stall — there’s no room for them elsewhere — while Cianfrini puts away dirty dishes.


Bathroom stall or jersey closet?

Paul ‘Chinner’ Cianfrini handles dishes duty.

Home at last.

In the ECHL, patchwork comes with the territory.
“I slept maybe one hour and my gear is going to be freezing for the game,” Donaghey complains to himself.

As Stixy angrily cleans the countertops — the injured players didn’t maintain the room while the team was gone — Chaulk retreats to his office to go over video with Leveille and make phone calls. It’s Chaulk’s birthday. A few hours ago, he turned 41.

To try and stay focused, Chaulk goes for a run around the rink shortly before the players wander back in at 11 a.m. When they arrive, they write down how many tickets they need for friends and family. Every player gets two, but they often use each other’s spares.

The speaker system in the room crackles and flickers. In the coach’s room, where Stixy tries to shower, the lights are touch-and-go.

When Folkes and MacLean arrive, they gather near the couches at the back of the dressing room and discuss their other jobs. Folkes and MacLean are childhood friends from Burlington, Ont., who played and lived together at Carleton University. They then followed the same path to Brampton after spending 2015-16 playing pro in England and Germany, respectively.

Folkes dreams not of playing in the NHL but of the AHL, something he knows — at 28 — is a long shot. In the summer, he spends 12-hour work days outside building swimming pools, a job he has held since his summers off at Carleton.

It can be hard to find time to skate and work out, but he can’t afford to spend his summers training.

“You’re so tired that you just want to go home and sit down and sleep. Hockey’s a passion of mine and even if it’s to go on the ice at 11 at night for a beer-league game with my friends, that’s what I do,” he says. “You always find time, especially towards the end of the summer to get ready for my other job, which is playing hockey.”

MacLean works as a risk management consultant with Business Insurance Services, based out of Hamilton, year-round and always carries his business card. His wife’s parents own the brokerage, and he began studying for his tests in his spare time while playing in rural Ravensburg, Germany.

He has had several call-ups to the AHL but likes being the resident motivator and assistant captain with the Beast.


Brandon MacLean fights through the night, cards in hand, as the camera gets so cold it can’t focus.

‘Dickey’ MacLean

‘Mucksy’ MacLean

MacLean plays keep-up.

Brandon MacLean, part-time insurance broker.

Mike Folkes, part-time pool builder.
Most of all, they love playing with each other and take pride in helping make a rotating cast of scratches and backup goalies feel welcome in a league that often isn’t welcoming at all.

“We have an older team so everyone has done it. It can be hard to fit in and we’ve embraced it and made it easy. Honestly, some of my best friends in the world are on this team and I’ve played with them for a year. Some of them I’ve just played with for a couple of months,” Folkes says. “Not to mention the schedule with the way we play. It’s hard not to come together when you’re going through long bus trips and shit weather. It definitely has taken its toll on everybody that has gone through it.”

“The older guys that have been here have bounced around so many teams that they know what it’s like to be the new guy walking into a room so we try to embrace the new guy, make him feel at home,” echoes MacLean.

The players can be as nomadic as the league itself. In addition to the current 27 teams in the league, there's a list of 57 defunct or relocated teams over the course of the league's near-30-year history.

Chaulk starts a video session. He runs a couple of the night before’s bloopers — all of which conveniently feature MacLean — to get a quiet room laughing. MacLean responds by complaining that none of his good sequences were included.

Eventually, Chaulk turns his attention to David Ling and Jordan Henry.

Ling has spent the last few months playing in the 3HL, a new 3-on-3 tour that features a lot of former Beast players. He is 43, overweight, slow and never stops talking (on or off the ice). The last Quebec Nordiques draft pick left standing, Ling was picked before Donaghey was born. He drinks coffee between periods.

For the Beast's third game in three nights, Chaulk gave Ling a call because he can still help the power play. He remains one of the better passers in the league and is an intimidating presence given his 93 games of NHL experience.

Henry, one of the team’s best defencemen, is nursing several broken ribs and will join Chaulk behind the bench to coach the defence.

“As far as the slide we’re on, remember: There’s no panic. I'm not trading anybody. Focus on getting two today. You get two days off. I know we're in one, but you have more to give. I know you do,” Chaulk says.

===

They didn’t have more. And they all knew it. They were in one alright.

So when Chaulk's spunky nine-year old daughter, Caprie, arrived from a hockey game of her own with the Etobicoke Dolphins, fresh off scoring twice and still in her blue No. 91 tracksuit — her dad’s number — and begged him to let her do the starting lineups, he was happy to oblige.

And when MacLean poked his head into Chaulk’s office to ask if he could deliver today’s pregame speech, he was also happy to oblige.

First, the floor belonged to MacLean.

At the centre of the room, he’d set up a folding table.

“It’s times like this, when things are really tough, and we’re in one that guys start going on their own page. When everybody grabs the rope together, that’s when you get out of shit. So Chinner, I’m going to ask you to lie down on this table for a second — randomly selected, not because you’re the heaviest guy,” MacLean said, Cianfrini rising and looking a little confused about where things were headed.

“Does anybody think I can lift Chinner above my head with one finger. He’s what, 220?” MacLean asked. Everyone shook their heads.

“You don’t think I can lift him above my head with one finger?” he continued, before giving it a try.


Resident motivator.
Unsuccessful, he turned to Marino for help.

“Mo, can you come over here for a second? Just grab him with one finger and lift,” he said. Marino joined him on the opposite side of the table to attempt to lift it with him, again to no avail.

“Everybody, get a fucking finger!” he finally shouted.

“Hey!” they shouted back.

“One fucking finger. If one guy doesn't pull his weight, this fucker gets heavy,” he screamed, as each player placed a finger under the rim of the table and lifted together.

“Yeah!” they shouted, successfully lifting up Cianfrini but with the table tipping sideways.


In one, together.
“One more fucking time! Everybody! Chinner’s a little heavier than I thought!” MacLean shouted back, the team lifting Cianfrini once more. “If one guy pulls out, it gets heavier and heavier and we lose games. Pull together here and we’ll get out of this fucking thing and go on a run!”

Then, the floor belonged to Caprie.

“Starting at left wing, No. 97, David Vallorani!” she yelled, reading from a piece of paper she’d scribbled on.

“Woo!” the room answered back.

“Starting at centre, No. 89, Luc-Olivier Blain!”

“Hey!”

“Starting at right wing, No. 17, Brandon ‘Dickey’ MacLean!”

“Hey!”

“At left D, No. 3, Matt ‘Gravy’ Petgrave!”

“Hey!”

“On right D, No. 12, Reggie ‘Bro’ Traccitto!”

“Hey!”

“And starting in goal, the one and only, No. 30, Andrew D’Agostini! Game day boys! Let’s go!”


A bright light.
Three hours later, they’d lost their fifth straight.

During the second intermission, Blain stormed into Chaulk’s office in a rage — after having scored the team’s lone goal — to complain about getting just one shift in the final 10 minutes of the second.

Minutes later, he returned.

“I saw red. I’m sick. I’m hurting. I’ve told you this. I’m sorry. I trust you. I just don’t want guys who aren’t working to get ice time. You know I’m a team player and I normally don’t do this. I said I was tired and I needed one shift off and then I sit 10 minutes after I win faceoffs, PK and score. We’ve got guys out there taking horrible penalties! I want to win this fucking game,” he said, apologizing before Chaulk left the room to issue his first signs of frustration in four days during a last-ditch speech.

“I slept 30 fucking minutes today to cut the game and make sure I’m prepared for you guys. Thirty minutes. Grow the fuck up!” Chaulk shouted.


“I didn’t really realize until I looked at it this year. It’s not the Sunday game that kills you. It’s the Saturday game on the road. Even if we played somewhere far on Friday, at least you’re in your own bed on Saturday if it’s two and three at home,” Chaulk says, sympathizing with the players over their schedule.

Chaulk’s biggest fan.

Chaulk has a little more space for video at home.

Chaulk and Lemay share this office.

Even strength, penalty kill, power play, forwards, defence, goalies. Chaulk has to do several coaches’ jobs.
The loss and the familiar silence that followed was exhaustion speaking.

The 11-hour bus ride without food on Day 1. The six-hour overnight trip on Day 2. The eight-hour overnight trip on Day 3.

Players in hoodies unloading buses and setting up dressing rooms in the dead of the night, shivering from the cold and hunger.

Struggling to breathe on a bus where you could literally see the diesel fumes in the air, seeping through the vents.

But after a third loss in less than three days, they weren’t yet done.

“Workout first or skate first, but you’ve got to do both, boys,” Marino announced to the room, reminding the players of their tradition after every Sunday home game: a mandatory skate with the fans.


The next generation.
And skate they did.

“How about that for your first road trip, eh?” Petgrave said to me before taking to the ice.

“That’s what being in one looks like,” Chaulk said.

And I knew what they meant.

(All photographs by Scott Wheeler/The Athletic)

Scott Wheeler is a national prospects writer and Toronto Marlies reporter for The Athletic Toronto. Scott has written for the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, The Toronto Sun, National Post, SB Nation, the PGA TOUR, McKeen’s Hockey, FC and The Hockey News. Follow Scott on Twitter @scottcwheeler .