Mike Danton was asked if he had complete control of the roster this week.
“Why wouldn’t I?” the new Junior A Crushers coach replied.
Oh, we could think of two or three reasons, but he didn’t dodge what he knew was coming.
Co-owners Bruce Ryan and Scott Burden have sons currently at training camp (Burden has two) but according to Danton, he’s the one in charge.
“They’ve both assured me that their sons don’t have to be on the team, and they’re not going to tell me where they’re going to play, or how much,” Danton said on Aug. 26.
“They’ve both made it clear that I’m the boss when it comes to the players and I think they trust my judgement.
“If I’m not the one making the decisions, and if the players can see that, they’re going to lose respect, and they’re not going to listen to me when they have to go out on the ice. Guys in the room know who deserves to be there and who doesn’t, and if there are guys who don’t deserve to be there, they’re going to look at me and say, ‘what the heck, Mike?’ And they’ll put two and two together.”
Yeah, the players will know – they’re funny like that. As far as the owners’ sons, if they play and are productive, the coaches and fans of the Crushers won’t care what their last names are.
Non-Sports Thoughts of the Week:
• With school starting up again soon, here’s the best advice I can give kids who are entering high school: all those cliques don’t really matter. The popular kids aren’t as important as some think they are, and once they’ve been out of high school a year or two, no one will care that they won the popularity contest when they were in Grade 12.
• Here’s another piece of unsolicited advice, because after all, it takes a village to raise a child: turn off the cell phones in class, even if some school administrators turn a blind eye.
Those things are called SmartPhones, but they aren’t making you any smarter.
• When George Canyon was introduced on Aug. 22 as the new Conservative candidate in Central Nova, I thought he might come galloping into the room on a white stallion, holding a flat-top guitar and singing some old-fashioned ditties.
He’s “true blue, all the way,” as he told the Tory faithful, who are quite true blue themselves.
Canyon did wear a cowboy hat and strummed his guitar during the proceedings, singing a couple of Johnny Cash tunes and also the Marty Robbins classic ‘El Paso’. The guy can sing, I tell ’ya.
• They sure got those election signs made fast, the ones with the hat-wearing, square-jawed country crooner smiling at you, larger than life. It’s almost like party organizers knew Canyon would be replacing Roger MacKay before Roger MacKay knew about it.
MacKay went from promoting a campaign event one morning to stepping down (or aside, if you will) in the afternoon. That’s so strange, isn’t it?
Politics is funny.
Other Random Sports Thoughts:
• Update from Cleveland: the biggest controversy at Cleveland Browns training camp this year is, who’s going to win the placekicking job? Usually, that’s far, far down the list of problems in Cleveland.
• You know that summer has started to fade once people start sending in photos of baseball teams that have won championships.
The New Glasgow Cubs, who won the provincial U11 championships this past weekend in Bridgewater, still have the best baseball team nickname in Pictou County. It’s simple and old-school, and they have great uniforms, too.
Kevin Adshade is a writer with The News. His column appears each week.
