YORKTON - The Yorkton Junior Terriers are celebrating 50 years in the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League this season.
To mark the milestone Yorkton This Week is digging into its archives and pulling out a random Terrier-related article from the past five decades of reporting on the team, and will be running one each week, just as it originally appeared.
This feature will appear weekly over the entire season in the pages of The Marketplace and on SASKTODAY.ca.
Week #8 comes from January 1987.
By Dave Quick
It was one of those down-to-the-wire games.
The Yorkton Terriers needed an empty net goal Sunday from Perry Fafard to secure a 10-8 win over the Estevan Bruins. Fafard and captain Mark Marianchuk broke away from the pack and skated in alone on the empty net.
Marianchuk then unselfishly passed the puck over to Fafard, who easily scored with 35 seconds left in the game, played before about 825 spectators at the Parkland Agriplex. The Terriers’ league record is now 19-18.
Yorkton’s captain says he gave up the goal, “because he (Fafard) did most of the work getting the puck out of our end, I caught up with the puck and figured he deserved the goal.”
The goal, more or less, sealed the fate of the Bruins, who made a spirited comeback, despite being down 8-3 after two periods.
Yorkton’s win was the first credited to Barry Marianchuk, who took over as coach Sunday after coach and general manager Norm Johnston was fired earlier in the day.
“It was quite scary, because they (Estevan) didn’t quit,” says the coach. “We made some glaring defensive mistakes in the third period and they capitalized.”
On the other hand, he is pleased with Yorkton’s scoring output – “anytime you score 10 goals you should win.”
The Terriers were helped out considerably in this regard by centre Eddie Zawatsky, who scored five goals and added two assists. Zawatsky remembers scoring six goals as a midget against Notre Dame a few years ago.
The goals were “going in fairly easily Sunday and bouncing off me (into the net),” he jokes. At this point in the season, Zawatsky has an unofficial total of 44 goals and 43 assists for 87 points and is behind only Humboldt’s Bill McDougall in the league’s scoring race.
However, McDougall, who has more than 100 points, “is soaring pretty well and it will be hard to catch him.”
Before the third period got underway, it appeared Estevan’s fate was sealed, “but it got tense towards the end. Some fans probably thought we should have won easily, but we were kind of tired going into the third and lots happened over the weekend.”
As well, Estevan started playing much better in the third.
Earlier in the week, Melville downed Yorkton 6-4.
Aside from Zawatsky’s five goals, Fafard added two, with singles scored by Brent Mireau, Ian Tuberfield, and Darren Gates. Marianchuk added three assists, while Grant Ottenbreit and Curtis Fayant each had two assists.
Scott Burfoot scored a hat-trick for the Bruins, with single goals added by Ed McMillen, Scott Clendenning, Ken Shaw, Chris Lindberg and Dean Ehrmantraut.
The Terriers got off to a fast start on two goals by Zawatsky and one by Mireau on the way to taking a 3-1 lead. A power play goal by Burfoot narrowed the gap to 3-2 midway through the opening period, but Tuberfield tapped the puck by Estevan goalie Eric Strachan on a four-on-four situation with four minutes left.
Forty-five seconds into the middle period, Zawatsky stole the puck at the Bruins’ blue line and scored his third goal. A few seconds later Estevan’s Trevor Thomas was awarded a penalty shot after Pat Chotowetz put his glove on the puck in Yorkton’s crease.
But Thomas shot the puck over both the shoulder of the goalie Evan Westerlund and the crossbar. Soon after, McMillen scored on a power play goal to lower the gap to 5-3.
Yorkton scored three goals to round out the period – Tuberfield made a pass from behind the net to set up Gates, Zawatsky jumped on a loose puck by the Estevan net after a lot of work by Marianchuk and Ottenbreit, and, from the left faceoff circle, Fafard put a partially screened shot past Strachan.
But most of the third period belonged to Estevan. Burfoot scored on a breakaway early in the period, while soon after, a sharp-angle shot from Clendenning counted after the Terriers were sloppy in their own end. At the mid-point of the period, Shaw stole the puck inside the Terrier line to narrow the gap to 8-6.
With nine minutes left, Zawatsky scored what could be termed a “lucky” goal. Ottenbreit fed a pass to the Terriers’ centre that seemed to go a bit too far. But Zawatsky just managed to tip the puck and it rolled between the pads of Strachan.
But Estevan wasn’t dead yet. With three minutes left, Yorkton’s Lee Odelein blocked the first shot of Ehrmantraut, but the shooter grabbed his own rebound and skated around Westerlund for the eighth goal.
Soon after, Strachan was pulled from the net and Estevan, in particular Lindberg, put a lot of pressure on Westerlund. But Fafard’s goal put the game out of reach.
Estevan outshot the Terriers 18-9 in the final period and overall outshot their hosts 41-33.
An edition of Sunday night at the fights ensued in the third period, as the match-ups of Tuberfield and Colin McKersie, Yorkton’s Troy McDonnell and Estevan’s Geoff Simpson, plus Terriers’ Mark Woolgar and Bruins’ Wade Shutter flailed away at each other in three separate battles.
