Round Lake senior hockey team to join NCHL
Bears bound for Alberta
May 12, 2025, 10:23 am
Ryan Kiedrowski, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
When the puck drops for the Round Lake Bears later this fall, it will drop in Alberta. After years of trying to play with a league in Saskatchewan, the Bears have officially been welcomed to the 30-year-old North Central Hockey League.
“All the players are excited to be back in a league,” said Bears manager Winston Bear. “I just wish we could have had it in our area, or that we had an AA or AAA here. We want to try and take a run for the Allan Cup.”
The Bears will be playing out of the Enoch Community Centre, located on the Enoch Cree Nation on Treaty 6 land just east of Edmonton. They will be the 10th team in the league with a regular season of 18 games set to begin Oct. 4.
“Their league over there is played on the weekends,” explained Bear, adding that he’s got two charter busses secured for players making the trip. Also, the Bears will have a pick of players from Edmonton and Enoch in addition to locals already on the roster. Plus, there’s some young hopefuls coming up that will be great additions to the Bears lineup in the future.
“We got a pile of kids there that just turned 18 and 19 years old,” Bear said. “They’re still in their junior years, and they’re still playing junior, we don’t want to take them away from that, so we’ll get them at the end of the their season when it’s tournament time.”
There are plans to live-stream Bears games online, and the regular season is a bit shorter as playoffs are finished by the end of March.
Long time coming to find a home
Bear explained that the team has been around for about nine years, and finding a league has been an uphill battle. The most recent attempt was to join the Qu’Appelle Valley Highway Hockey League, where the Bears were ultimately denied entrance.
“When we couldn’t get in the league, we pulled some people off the couch and said, ‘let’s go play hockey’,” he said. “Then three, four years ago, we got a little more serious and we’ve been winning. I think last year we made $128,000, the year before $108,000, and the year before that was $98,000, so we’ve been doing pretty good at tournaments. We got a lot of good sponsors and a lot of loyal players.”
When asked if the Round Lake team would consider a Saskatchewan league if approached, Bear was hesitant in his answer.
“They kind of broke us down,” he relied after a reflective pause. “We’d of gladly help in any kind of way.”
Bear recounted how his team gifted the Kenaston Blizzards with Senior A provincial champs items after the two met in a best-of-three series back in March. Round Lake had claimed the first game of that series 8-4, but the Blizzard would return in Game 2 with a 7-5 win, then capping the series with an 8-3 victory over Round Lake in Game 3.
“In fact, the Round Lake Bears gave Kenaston championship caps and T shirts just like the NHL does, and they were able to put them on and get the pictures taken,” Bear explained. “That just shows how much we wanted to help. We’re not there to hurt anybody, we all work. We’re not doing any damage to anybody, because we’ve got to live in the community.”
Persistence has paid off as Bear detailed how the idea of joining an Alberta league came about.
“We called around, we’ve been calling around since last year when we didn’t get in the league,” he said. “We never got a call back this year, so we just said, ‘hey, let’s try over there.’ I gave my presentation and they asked me to leave the room, I went to my truck, I just sat down and they called me back in. I thought, ‘I guess this is another wasted trip,’ it just happened so quick. And then I went up the steps, they said, ‘welcome to the NCHL.’ Then I called home.”
Hockey bigger than the game
Having a place to call home is huge for the Bears, and has farther reaching effects than a physical realm. As Bear explained, hockey has been a safe place for the young people in the community.
“Before Covid, when hockey was going full bore, we had a lot of kids that weren’t doing drugs and they were in shape,” he said. “After not being able to get in the league and not being able to play hockey, they just drifted away, and then they’re hurting themselves. So we want to bring them back here again. We have to.”
Even trying to form a Bantam-level team has proven difficult as players don’t see a place to advance without a team to be there as they age. With the Bears securing the Enoch rink, that promise has returned.
“They want to play, we brought that back, and we’re very proud to have done that,” Bear said, excited for the coming 2025/26 NCHL season. “We’re really looking forward to it, and it’s going to be a dandy!”
