Bedford’s approach to coaching very hands-off

Just over a week earlier, the Huskies program had been cut due to low enrolment and plunging revenues at the school.

Bedford was out of a job. Now, as he sat in the hotel room two and a half hours South of Fort McMurray, he was also on the brink of losing his home because of the forest fire that ravaged the city.

Yet the home is not the most important thing on his mind.

“We still didn’t know that the house had burned down so…we held out hope that it wasn’t but I was just more worried about our players and making sure they were safe,” Bedford, now the North Stars head coach, recalled after practice earlier this week. “Once we were comfortable that they were all safe, my next intention was to get home as quick as possible back to Ontario.”

Before meeting up with some of his players at that hotel, Bedford was racing down the highway out of the city, at about 160 km an hour. He figured he was one of the last trucks to get out before the police started holding people back and he didn’t want to be stuck.

It’s clear it was a turbulent time in his life and the memories are still fairly fresh, but a Nate Bedford story isn’t complete without some sort of humour. It’s just who he is.

“The ambers were hitting my truck and they were the size of ping pong balls,” Bedford said. “It was getting scary for sure. So I got in my truck, put it in reverse and then I realized I forgot one precious item. So I ran back inside and grabbed my bottle of Jack Daniels.

“We had money sitting on a table that was about a foot away from the door so I’ve heard about that for quite some time now. It was a substantial amount of money. Looking back, you lost everything. Every document that we ever had, we lost. Anything that was expensive. The only thing that I got was a mismatch bag of luggage of just odd-end clothes and I didn’t pick that out. I lost all my suits; [Katy] lost all her clothes. It was literally a complete restart. I didn’t bring any water but I had Jack Daniels.”

The day he left, Bedford was supposed to have a job interview with his old employer, MacDonald Island Park, which is Canada’s largest recreation centre and where he worked before the job as head coach at Keyano.

But that never happened.

Right as he was getting set for the interview, he looked out the back window of his home and noticed it was extremely dark outside, despite it being midday.

Then he noticed people racing to their vehicles outside and turned on the radio, only to hear the evacuation alert.

“It was a tough five minutes to look around the house that you knew you were going to lose and know that was the last time you were going to be in there,” Bedford said. “It’s just one of those situations where you can sit and feel sorry for yourself or you [remember] that things are just that: just things. We lost things but the hard part was the memories that you lose. We put so much time and effort into making the house a home and I think that was the tough part. So what we did was we made our house back in Ontario a home as well.”

As it turns out, the Peterborough couple would be making a new place their home before long.

It was just over three months after fleeing Fort McMurray that Bedford came on board as the North Stars new head coach.

“They needed someone who could move quickly and someone without belongings can move as quick as anybody,” Bedford joked.

But it was obviously more than that.

“When we saw his resume, we were really impressed with how he turned the program in Fort McMurray around,” North Stars president Troy Slywka said of the board’s decision to bring Bedford on board. “And the other thing that really impressed me was he was willing to travel in to an interview from Ontario rather than doing it via phone or via skype.

“There was a colleague of his out of the Alberta College Athletic Conference who spoke very highly of Nate in how he turned that program from being an easy win, to when opposition faced them that they’d have to take that program very seriously.”

Bedford knows who that colleague was – former North Stars head coach Blaine Gusdal, who is currently the head coach of the Augustana Vikings in the ACAC.

“He’s become a real good friend, a real mentor for me,” Bedford said. “I think he put his name on the line to help me get the job. So I had a lot of support and I’m definitely appreciative of that. I think if Gus doesn’t say anything to our organization, I don’t think I get the job.”

As a head coach, Bedford, whose dad also coached junior A back in Ontario, takes a fairly hands off approach.

He lets the players be themselves and often jokes around with them.

“He’s pretty laid back and likes to treat the boys like men,” North Stars defenceman Zach Nedelec said. “That goes a long way in letting the boys figure it out for themselves.”

Part of that attitude comes from his father, but part of it also comes from his experience helping coach with the Ottawa Senators in the early 2000s, an opportunity that was only made possible because of the great Roger Neilson.

Bedford grew up cutting grass for the legendary coach, who passed away in 2003 at age 69 because of cancer. Bedford’s family and Neilson lived on the same lake in Peterborough.

“Being a 12-year-old kid, you go up to where he is and kind of just stand there and stare at him until he pays you [but] I realized that he couldn’t take his eyes off a TV screen,” Bedford said. “Here we are in July and he’s watching a game from February. Not even a team he coached at the time: two other teams. So you can see the passion he had.

“I would sit and watch the game with him and as a kid, or the majority of people, they watch the game following the puck all the time. He was the first one to teach me to stop following the puck and look at where players are so you can anticipate.”

Bedford considers Neilson to have been like an uncle to him and when Neilson was diagnosed with cancer for a second time, Bedford quit what he jokingly referred to as a ‘flourishing’ professional career (he was on the fringes at the time as a goaltender trying to work his way up in Michigan) to go back up to Ottawa and care for Neilson first hand.

“I drove straight up to Ottawa and I spent the next eight months with him until he died,” Bedford said. “I watched him go from 170 pounds to 105 and I would have to pick him up and put him in the bathtub and I’m 22 years old.

“So yeah it was always tough…Looking back, I wouldn’t have changed it. I think it made me strong…and had Roger not believed in me to take care of him fully, which is taking him to doctor’s appointments, making sure his medication was all there, and really kind of being his primary caregiver, if he didn’t trust me to do that, I don’t know if I’d be coaching right now. I don’t know that I’d have the feeling that I could do it.”

During those several months, the Senators kept Neilson’s spot in the press box where he and Bedford would watch from. During intermissions of games, Bedford would go down to the dressing room and relay information and observations to the coaching staff at the time.

While helping as a video coach, Bedford said the biggest thing he learned was not to over-coach.

“Jacques Martin, who was the head coach at the time…would never have a pre-game talk that dragged on,” Bedford said. “He would never talk too much on the ice. I just learned that when guys are moving and they don’t have someone in their ear all the time, that’s a strategy for coaching and I think that’s one of the strategies that I learned. Figure out what your point is, get it across as soon as possible, and then move on.

“I see it far too often now where our coaches try to over coach and over explain and almost over-talk what they’re supposed to be doing. It’s great to be an X’s and O’s guy. It’s great to have a system. It’s great to show guys when they do things right or do things wrong. I support all that. It’s just, [when] you’re 19 years old, I don’t think you want to listen to a 40-year-old talk to you for 15, 20 minutes about the game you just played.”

And in his first season in the Battlefords, his approach has worked.

The team set a franchise record for most wins, most points and fewest goals allowed, while going 48-9-1.

Bedford takes zero credit.

“Probably my best coaching tactic is opening the door and letting them play,” he joked. “The way I coach, [of] letting them be young men and waiting for them to make mistakes and then trying to help them fix it is my strategy here. We haven’t done a lot of X’s and O’s. We don’t do anything over the top crazy system-wise. We don’t have anything special that we try to implement. We just try to be a hard working team that blocks shots, that sacrifices for each other, and is OK with another guy getting similar or more ice [time].”

Does that mean he won’t bother matching lines in the team’s upcoming playoff series against the Weyburn Red Wings?

Absolutely not.

Bedford still learned from one of the greatest NHL coaches of all-time.

“You don’t need to be matching lines in game 20 of a 5-1 hockey game,” Bedford said. “But yeah, we’ll match lines, because I think it’s the right thing to do and I think our players would want that. But we’ve rolled lines for 58 games and we were pretty successful with it. I’m not going to come in with a whole bunch of new strategies because it’s playoff time. These guys have proved that they deserve a little bit of autonomy and we’re going to give that to them as long as they do the little things right.”

Game one of that quarter-final playoff series goes tomorrow at the Civic Centre at 7:30 p.m.

Nathan.kanter@jpbg.ca

@NathanKanter11

by Nathan Kanter

Bedford’s approach to coaching very hands-off

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