The Daily Gamecock

Sirois brings gritty bus league experience to Ice Cocks

If you heard his name at the dinner table, or Community Table, or perhaps around any table between here and southeast Quebec, you’d have but one response: “Who?”

And you’d have to be forgiven that. He doesn’t have the name recognition of a Will Muschamp, or a Frank Martin. His scowls don’t make the rounds on Deadspin, and ESPN won’t break into scheduled programming if he takes the open job at Mississippi State.

He is Allan Sirois, and he stands at the helm of the South Carolina Gamecocks ice hockey club.

Much like Muschamp, Sirois knows his game backwards and forwards. But unlike Muschamp, who has patrolled sidelines since the age of 24, Sirois’s knowledge of the game of hockey comes almost entirely from having played it. A lot.

“Al just brings that new dynamic of pro hockey to this team, and that’s something that I think makes for a successful college team,” says Viktor Smith, the club’s head equipment manager.

In a professional hockey career lasting from 1996 to 2009, Sirois played 832 regular season games for eight teams in three leagues. He scored 323 goals, notched 435 assists, and spent just under 22 hours in penalty boxes from Worcester, Massachusetts, to Beaumont, Texas.

Sirois grew up in Rivière-du-Loup, a city of 20,000 on the southern shore of the St. Lawrence River in hockey-crazed Quebec, Canada. He began skating at the age of 3 and took up hockey at 5, eventually leaving home as a 15-year-old to play midget hockey in another town. His dedication soon paid off.

In 1992, the Chicoutimi Saguenéens took the 17-year-old Sirois with the 18th pick of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League (QMJHL) Midget Draft. With his ascent to Canadian major junior hockey, an NHL Entry Draft appearance became one step closer.

Sirois tallied a respectable 61 goals in his first three seasons in Chicoutimi, and in 1994 hoisted the President’s Cup as the Saguenéens claimed victory in the QMJHL playoffs. But there was much more to come.

During the 1995 offseason, Sirois knew he was likely to get traded by the Saguenéens to abide by league rules regarding the number of overaged, 20-year-old players the team could carry. At the same time, the Saint-Jean Lynx relocated to Rimouski, a modest city of 40,000 on the St. Lawrence coast just northeast of Rivière-du-Loup. The move offered Sirois an opportunity.

Whereas the drive from Rivière-du-Loup to Chicoutimi is four hours down, across, and away from the St. Lawrence River, Rimouski is only 68 miles up Quebec Autoroute 20 from Sirois’s hometown. For the young hockey player, deciding on a new home was a simple one.

In the fall of 1995, Rimouski Océanic took the ice for the first time with Sirois wearing the captain’s “C” on his jersey. The change of scenery made a difference.

“Seeing my friends, my family at every game, it was very motivating,” Sirois said of the trade. “I wanted to pursue hockey after that.”

In his final season of junior hockey, Sirois paced Océanic with 59 goals and 68 assists in 69 games, finishing as the league’s sixth-highest scorer. His 127-point campaign wowed fans such that in 2003, the team retired Sirois’s #12 to the rafters of Sun Life Financial Coliseum in Rimouski. It remains there today, flanked by the #4 worn by four-time NHL All-Star Vincent Lecavalier and the #39 worn by two-time Stanley Cup champion Brad Richards.

But in Canadian major junior hockey, players are no longer eligible to compete when they will be 20 years of age at the beginning of the season. Thus, when Rimouski was eliminated in the second round of the 1996 QMJHL playoffs, Sirois had reached the end of his junior career without being drafted by an NHL team.

Not long after leaving Rimouski, Sirois joined the Worcester IceCats of the American Hockey League, an affiliate for the NHL’s St. Louis Blues. After scoring one goal in three games with Worcester, Sirois began the 1996-97 season with the Baton Rouge Kingfish of the East Coast Hockey League (ECHL), hockey’s equivalent of Double-A minor league baseball. Here, his career began in full force.

The ECHL is well-known for developing future NHL talent in wildly unconventional markets. At one time, the league maintained four franchises in the state of South Carolina alone: the South Carolina Stingrays (North Charleston), the Pee Dee Pride (Florence), the Greenville Grrrowl and the Columbia Inferno, who played in Carolina Coliseum from 2001 to 2008. As of the 2016-17 season, only the Stingrays remain in operation.

The leagues that make up the NHL’s farm system - such as the ECHL - are affectionately known as the “bus leagues,” and with good reason. As minor league franchises do not boast the fan base nor the payroll of NHL squads, they often do not have the revenue to charter airplanes for players and coaches to fly between cities. Instead, teams bus it to games.

For the Kingfish, that meant grueling highway treks from eastern Louisiana to Richmond, Virginia; or Mobile, Alabama; or Pensacola, Florida. Perhaps on consecutive nights. Add to that the fact that Sirois didn’t speak English when he reported to training camp in 1996.

“It took me 35 hours to drive there,” Sirois said of his arrival in Baton Rouge. “If I didn’t love this game as much as I did, I probably would’ve left, went back home.”

But Sirois stuck it out. In his first season in Baton Rouge, he led the Kingfish with 58 points, earning a late-season call-up to Worcester. He stayed with the IceCats through the beginning of the following season, but was sent back to Baton Rouge after being held pointless in the first three games of 1997-98. He never made it past the ECHL level again.

The following season, Sirois moved to South Carolina to play in Florence for the Pee Dee Pride, an ECHL franchise in its second season of play. Though oddly located, the team was a hit with local sports fans.

“We drew NASCAR fans,” said Ryan Petz, a Pride forward from 1997 to 2003. “The type of hockey we played was very fast, very rough.”

A native of Calgary, Alberta, Petz played a total of 13 seasons in the minor leagues before retiring in 2007. Today, he works as a sales manager for KW Beverage, a beer distributor on Bluff Road in the shadow of Williams-Brice Stadium. But it’s unlikely he’ll forget the crowds he once played in front of at Florence Civic Center.

“We averaged over 5,000 a night, weekends we’d get 7,200 people,” Petz said. “Being in a small town and having that kind of support, it was a good place to play hockey.”

It was with the Pride that Sirois had the most productive season of his career in 1998-99, finishing second in team scoring with 84 points as the team won the ECHL regular season title. He spent the next six seasons in Florence.

“We were received very well, I mean, the fans were great right off the bat,” Sirois said. “As you can tell the guys liked it so much, you’ll see on the rosters, the guys played three, four, five seasons on the same team. You don’t see that too often in the minors.”

Sirois spent the 2005-06 season with the league’s Greenville Grrrowl, then transitioned to the Southern Professional Hockey League, a young, lower-level outfit with teams based mainly in the Southeast. During his three seasons in the SPHL, Sirois often took on a player-coach role, counseling younger players just beginning their careers as his own began to wind down.

Then, while playing with the SPHL’s Twin City Cyclones in the 2008-09 season, Sirois broke his arm during a game. Nearing age 34, he began to consider retirement.

Shortly after, while on the road with the Cyclones in March 2009, Sirois made a phone call to his wife, Christie. He told her his next game would be his last.

Sirois left the game with numbers that would get him inducted into the ECHL Hall of Fame in 2016. But when he called his wife to announce his retirement, he had no idea what was coming after. He’d been playing hockey for a living since age 21. He had attended college classes during his time in Quebec, but never graduated.

“It was scary at some point, because I really didn’t have any plans,” Sirois said.

Enter Ryan Petz.

Aside from his time with the Pride, Petz spent parts of five seasons with the Columbia Inferno. He began working at KW Beverage while with the team in 2002. Petz later bounced between the Inferno and teams in Florence and Augusta, Georgia, but ultimately settled in Columbia and began working full-time at KW.

And when Petz heard Sirois had retired, the old teammates began to discuss job openings.

“I was fortunate, my transition leaving hockey and entering the work field was very positive,” Petz said. “I couldn’t say enough about how good of a company Budweiser of Columbia was and it seemed to be a good fit for Allan at the time as well.”

Sirois is still with KW eight years later, having since moved up to a management position. He took the reins of the USC hockey club in the summer of 2015 after the departure of head coach Mike Lee, and now leads the Gamecocks through two practices a week and in weekend games throughout the Southeast.

With the Gamecocks, Sirois hopes to build a program capable of reaching the American Collegiate Hockey Association’s (ACHA) South Regional tournament, and eventually reaching the ACHA National tournament. His current squad gives him reason to believe his goal could be in sight.

“I don’t know if we’re there yet, but this team here is pretty solid,” Sirois said.

As the Gamecocks look ahead to their matchup with No. 4-seed Florida in the Southeastern Collegiate Hockey Conference (SECHC) playoffs Friday night, Sirois’s leadership will certainly be a factor. USC has never captured an SECHC title, and will seek their first on the home ice of No. 2-seed Vanderbilt in Antioch, Tennessee. But the players are hardly discouraged.

“The dedication, the love of the game that [Sirois] brings to the team is definitely a big positive for us,” says veteran defenseman Nick Nardslico.

Of the impending clash with Florida, Smith says he is confident in the Cocks’ ability to retain momentum, especially with proper coaching.

“It’s all spirit. We got a spark on this team and when we hit that spark during the game, we’re gone,” Smith said. “It’ll be 15 and nothing, I guarantee you, if we hit that spark.”

With a spark on the ice and Sirois behind the bench, one can only feel for the Gators.


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