Benefield: Quite a run for Santa Rosa Flyers club hockey team

Santa Rosa Flyers coach Tim Scally channeled his inner Herb Brooks.

In fact, the head coach of Santa Rosa’s U-18 youth hockey team recited in toto the speech Brooks gave the U.S. national hockey team before it defeated the Soviets at the 1980 Olympics in a game that instantly was dubbed the “Miracle on Ice.”

But the Flyers were plumb out of miracles. Their improbable run to the state club hockey championship game ended in defeat when they just didn’t have the answers for the Tri-Valley Blue Devils of Dublin, losing 4-0, on March 29.

Second place. Runner up. Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as champion.

But considering the season the Flyers were having before they put on a blazing run through their league playoff and then into the state competition, second place might as well be first. Heck, they might as well be world champs.

“It was just a wild ride,” said Angus Kojimoto, a student at Santa Rosa Junior College, and at a newly minted 19, one of the elder statesmen on the squad.

Wild indeed.

This was a team that had to pull nine guys from a younger age class just to fill out the roster. It was a team that with 15- and 16-year-olds playing against 18-year-olds came in dead last in the Northern California Junior Hockey Association league. Deep into the season they were 3-23-3 and counting as moral victories losses that weren’t blowouts.

Kids quit. Other kids were just trying to hang on, through illness and injury and the malaise that can befall anyone enduring that many losses. They played postseason games with an improbable eight healthy players.

For a handful of guys, this was their last season of club hockey. This was not how they, or their coaches, wanted to go out.

Assistant coach Erik Ott, whose son plays for the Flyers, called the regular season a “shipwreck.”

Until.

Until what? Something happened. Talk to different folks and they will say different things about what it was that changed. Head coach Tim Scally said it might have been when Ott gave a rousing pre-game talk ... in fluent Spanish. Kojimoto said confidence built when teams that were killing them 7-0 were suddenly struggling to put them away.

But that’s just it; they were still being put away. Until they entered the playoffs, where past records didn’t matter.

The team that finished last in league started, one by one, dispatching teams that had owned them all season.

Kojimoto, the guy who hadn’t scored all year, netted twice to rally the Flyers from a 2-0 deficit against their archrivals from Roseville, the No. 2 seed in the tournament. Then they dispatched No. 3 Santa Clara 3-2 after going in the hole early 1-0.

“It just looked like a different team out there. It was confidence,” said Ott.

“They came up with a motto, ‘Let’s just send these people home. We are they Flyers, let’s send them home,’?” Ott said.

The Flyers, playing eight guys because of illness and injury, still lost to the dominating Tri-Valley squad in the NorCal tournament, but no matter, their ticket was punched to the state tournament.

“Playing eight guys against the best team in the league ... ” Ott said. “I was smiling the whole time. I can’t believe what you guys are doing. That was probably more spectacular than the wins. They were willing to do whatever it takes, knowing they weren’t going to win, just to compete.”

And at state, the little team that came in last in its league promptly took apart the No. 2 Southern California seed, the Pasadena Leafs, 7-1.

They again lost to Tri-Valley 7-2 but still advanced to play the top-seeded team from Southern California, the Ontario Wave. After being manhandled by the Wave earlier in the season, the Flyers posted a 3-1 win.

“They had beaten us 4-1 and 4-2,” Ott said. “It was almost like we won the championship right there.”

The opposing coaches? They might have thought the Flyers swapped jerseys with another squad.

“They said, ‘Wow, this is not the same team,’?” Ott said.

When the coaches think back on the season’s nadir, nobody could quite put their finger on what was going wrong, what was amiss.

“I think we put a lot of time into this, staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night,” Ott said. “We love hockey. We want these guys to succeed and they weren’t succeeding.”

“It was hard,” Scally said of the losses and watching three players walk away midseason. “That can either fragment the team and derail you or it can be a catalyst for the team to bond together. That was the case with us.”

So when the wins came, at just the right time, no Flyer wanted to ask too many questions. Nobody wanted to break the spell.

And coming in second in the state championship? Nobody was that disappointed. Not only because Tri-Valley had owned everyone in the most dominating fashion all year long, but because playing in the championship game, even coming out with a loss, was the furthest stretch of their collective imagination not too long ago.

“It was a spectacular thing to see,” Kojimoto said.

You can reach Staff Columnist Kerry Benefield at 526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com, on Twitter @benefield and on Instagram at kerry.benefield.