(Taken from the Notre Dame Hounds chapter of ‘the Heart and Soul of the SJHL’ book, written by Jamie Neugebauer. Book compiled by Rod Pedersen)
The Notre Dame Hounds are different from any other team in the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League and, perhaps with only a very few exceptions, all of Canadian Junior ‘A’ hockey. They do not hide from it; they are not ashamed, and it is no secret to anyone.
Located on the campus of Athol Murray College of Notre Dame in Wilcox, SK, a tiny town of around 400 residents approximately 45 kilometres south of Regina, the team has always functioned as a part of the school. It, therefore, is not strictly the community business initiative that typifies the vast majority of the junior hockey clubs in Canada.
Notre Dame’s halls have been graced by well over 150 National Hockey League players, draft picks, many more professionals in other leagues, and most importantly, successful men and women in manifold careers worldwide. For all those who call themselves Hounds past and present, true success is wrapped up in holding firm to the poetic tenets that founder Pere Athol Murray famously penned regarding what it means to be a Notre Dame Man or Woman:
The world today is looking for men and women,
Who are not for sale
Who are honest, sound from centre to circumference, true to the heart’s core
With consciences as steady as the needle to the pole
Who will stand for the right if the heavens totter and the earth reels
Who can tell the truth and look the world right in the eye
Who neither brag nor run
Who neither flag or flinch
Who can have courage without shouting it
In whom the courage of everlasting life runs still, deep and strong
Who know their message and tell it
Who know their place and fill it
Who know their business and attend to it
Who will not lie, shirk or dodge
Who are not too lazy to work, nor too proud to be poor
Who are willing to eat what they have earned and wear what they have paid for
Who are not ashamed to say “No” with emphasis
Any discussion of the history of Notre Dame’s presence in the modern incarnation of Saskatchewan’s premier Junior ‘A’ league must necessarily start with a brief word about the school and its founder.
Pere Murray, as widely known, was sent to Regina by his parish in Quebec in 1922. By 1927, he had founded an all-boys boarding school called Notre Dame of the Prairies in Wilcox.
An avid believer that athletic competition can bring out the best in a young person, Pere was especially in love with hockey. His work developing youths, and in hockey in general, earned him a posthumous induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame in the Builder Category in 1998.
Under his watch, the Notre Dame Hounds were not unfamiliar with the junior game. They played in the rough-and-tumble South Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League from 1938 to 1945 and simultaneously in the fledgling Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League from 1944 to 1948.
Without the success that the travelling high school squads of Notre Dame had come to expect, the junior teams did not last, and for 22 years, there was no junior hockey in Wilcox.
The years between 1970 and 1976 saw two different Notre Dame franchises enter the brand new SJHL, as the school participated in the realignment of Canada’s Tier II Junior ‘A’ leagues as they separated from the Major Junior ranks, which continued battling for the Memorial Cup.
Under legendary baseball coach Hugh Huck, the Hounds and their sister club the Notre Dame Argos struggled again in Saskatchewan Junior ‘A’ hockey, with the Hounds winning only 83 of a possible 286 contests over the six years. The high point of that iteration came in the 1974-75 season, when Huck’s men grabbed 20 wins and finished fifth in the Southern Conference. Unfortunately, the lack of success, combined with the rising cost of running a junior team from tiny Wilcox while amid the institution-wide mourning at the passing of Pere Murray in ’75, led the school to shut down both clubs by 1976.
However, Notre Dame was not long absent from the SJHL, and its return 11 years later can only be described as thunderous.
