Jeremy Murray was always the kind of a player coaches loved to have on their team from the time he was playing for Trenton High School.
“He was one of our guys that we looked to, to score goals at the high school level,” says Pat Dunn who taught and coached Murray at the school. “He had a good head on his shoulders. A lot of good hockey sense.”
After his high school career, Murray went on to play for four years with the Pictou County Subways (the team that preceded what is today the Pictou County Scotians).
Again he proved his worth as both a leader and a player.
“The boys had a lot of respect for him,” said Kenny Arsenault who coached him at the time. “If he told them they weren’t doing something they should be they smartened right up and listened to him.”
“He was a real good team morale builder,” adds Ronnie Fraser, another coach.
Those coaches got a chance to reunite with Murray recently at an alumni game the Pictou County Scotians held at the Trenton rink.
Murray is now working as a welder in Alberta and British Columbia. He works on building shovels for Caterpillar for machines that will be used in oil mines.
“They’re the biggest in the world,” Murray said. “Nobody understands what I’m talking about unless you see them. They’re oversized excavators.”
There is no shortage of work for welders like Murray with a strong work ethic.
“It’s pretty wide open out there right now,” he said. “There’s no end to it any time soon.”
That’s not to say he wouldn’t rather be closer to home.
“It’s neat at first, but it definitely wears on you,” he said. “You get tired of doing a lot of the travelling but you got to do what you got to do.”
When he’s home, though, he said he loves to spend as much time as he can with his nephews and nieces and also around the rinks that were so much a part of his life growing up.
“You meet a lot of great people around here around the rinks,” he said. “A lot of guys that volunteered a lot of their time like Ronnie Fraser and Kenny Arsenault for example. They’ve been around the team for many years putting in time with training and a lot of extra stuff. You get a lot of character from people and I learned a lot of things from guys like that.”
While he’s traded a hockey stick for a welder's torch, those principles still help and he’s thankful for the impact hockey has had in his life.
