THUNDER BAY – Joel Scherban in a Lakehead Thunderwolves uniform almost never happened.
A hockey star with the London Knights, a draft pick of the Pittsburgh Penguins and a second-year student at Western by the time his major junior career wound down, Scherban had every intention of staying in southern Ontario to play for the Mustangs.
He’d heard about a new hockey program being introduced at Lakehead University, but said at the time he really wasn’t interested in joining an expansion team starting from scratch.
That’s until coach Pete Belliveau, team founder Jim Johnson and LU athletic director Tom Warden got involved, promising him they aimed for the new team to be competitive from the start.
Scherban listened and slowly started to believe.
Convinced the team had a chance at success he changed his mind and decided to live his life-long dream, to play elite-level hockey in his hometown.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Scherban would go on to lead the team to a pair of national championship berths over his five-year Thunderwolves career, culminating with a gold-medal game appearance in 2006.
A year earlier Scherban was named Canadian Interuniversity Sport’s player of the year, beating out future NHLer Joel Ward for the honour.
On Saturday, the 37-year-old Scherban, who also coached the Thunderwolves for three seasons, was inducted onto the university’s wall of fame, alongside basketball star John LaPlante, wrestler Katie Patroch, basketball’s Muriel Mortson, builders Jack Remus and Bill Keeler and the 1999-2000 women’s wrestling team, who won national bronze that season.
“It’s exciting,” the laid-back Scherban said of the honour. “I’m not really someone who enjoys the spotlight on me or personal recognition. I think it’s fitting that I got to be inducted with my teammates two years ago for ’05-’06. I think it’s fitting that someone like Jim Johnson has already been inducted as a builder.
“I hope that more of my teammates and more of the staff and administration have this honour going forward because there are so many people who really built this program.”
His fondest memory came in 2006, that final game at Fort William Gardens when the Wolves captured the Queen’s Cup as OUA champions.
“It was really a year of ups and downs and some adversity. We really rallied through in the playoffs and had an incredible playoff drive,” Scherban said. “I feel very fortunate to have ended my career in that way.”
Mortson’s career ended 40 years ago, but it feels just like yesterday, she said, adding her inclusion on the wall of fame came as a complete surprise.
“It was amazing, when you got the phone call, you’re sort of in shock. You’re going, ‘they remember you after all these years,’” said Mortson, also a member of LU’s field hockey team.
“It was just amazing and then to be able to come up here and see some of my old teammates, it’s just a fantastic feeling.”
LaPlante, a guard, played from 1984 to 1987 and then from 1988 to 1990, a second-team all-star on multiple occasions and Lakehead’s male athlete of the year in 1989.
Patroch earned bronze at the CIS wrestling championships in 2003 and 2006, going on to compete at the world championships as well as the Commonwealth and Pan Am Games.
Keeler was the long-time beloved manager of the C.J. Sanders Fieldhouse, who died earlier this year, while Remus, a physician, was instrumental in founding the school’s sports medicine clinic.
