Graham and Jamie Wise leading Ryerson men’s hockey team to historic season

Graham Wise can’t say he’s entirely surprised.

Had you told the head coach of Ryerson University’s men’s hockey team in September that his team would be in a race for first place in the OUA West division with only a handful of games remaining in the regular season, “I would have said, ‘sure we’ll take it,” Wise said in a recent phone interview. “I don’t think it was a goal that was out of reach.”

However, he understands why his team’s success – they’re currently in third place in the OUA West division, two points behind first place Western – has likely come as a surprise to a few people around the CIS.

It wasn’t long ago that Ryerson was a perennial basement dweller in the OUA standings.

Between 2002-2012 the Rams combined for an abysmal 56-195-16-2 record and the team won fewer than five games in five of those seasons.

Wise came on board after the 2005-2006 season, leaving York University where he spent 19 years as the head coach and won 13 division titles, two OUA championships and two national titles.

“I enjoyed York, I was there for 25 years and I was at a point where I was looking for a change and was looking for another challenge,” Wise said when asked why he decided to come to Ryerson.

A challenge is exactly what Wise got. In his first year at the helm at Ryerson the Rams won two games and they failed to earn a playoff berth in each of his first three seasons.

While the team struggled on the ice, Wise says he has nothing but the utmost respect for all the players who’ve donned Rams jerseys over the years because up until 2012, playing hockey at Ryerson meant dedicating yourself to a program that Wise called, “a bit nomadic.”

Nomadic because they never had a true ‘home rink,’ meaning players were forced to find their own way to an arena off campus for practices and home games.

“When I took over eight years ago we were [playing and practicing] at George Bell Arena [in Toronto's west end],” Wise said. “We had a really good set up there as far as dressing room, weight room, aerobics area and change area, but the problem was it was 9-10 kilometers off campus and it was tough for those kids.

“You have to give full credit to every one of our alumni that competed on the hockey team for the amount of travel they had to do everyday just to play on the team . . . It was 45 minutes to get to George Bell and another 45 minutes to an hour to get back downtown to campus plus the hour and a half time we had for practice. You were looking at four hours out of the day just to be able to play on the hockey team.”

That all changed in 2012 when the Rams moved to Maple Leaf Gardens, now known as the Mattamy Athletic Centre, a facility that’s a short walk away from Ryerson’s campus. The move is what Wise feels sparked the program’s turnaround as recruiting all of the sudden became a little bit easier.

“I think what’s brought the program on is we arguably play in the best facility in Canada for a university program… There’s a lot of hard work that goes on behind the scenes from a recruiting aspect but when you can talk to a player and have this facility [to talk about] it’s an amazing help for sure,” Wise said.

Graham’s son Jamie, a 22-year-old Ontario Hockey League graduate, is one player the Rams have acquired since the move to MLG. While it may seem like Ryerson would be an obvious choice being that his dad is behind the bench and the school is close to home, the younger Wise credits the new arena more than his dad’s place on the team and the school’s location when asked what sold him on playing for the Rams.

However, he admits there is something special about playing for a team where dad is the head coach.

“[When] I was a young kid I always used to be around the rink because he used to coach at York and I thought back when I was a kid that it was the best hockey ever,” Jamie Wise said. “I really wanted to be on the ice and now that I’m here it’s been fun with him coaching.”

Jamie played three years in the OHL with the Peterborough Petes and with the Mississauga St. Michaels Majors (now the Steelheads) and he learned how to adapt to playing any role the team needed him to, from fourth-line penalty specialist to top-line scorer. In his final year in junior he scored 31 goals while also amassing 70 penalty minutes.

But it wasn’t until after an unsuccessful tryout with the Buffalo Sabres that Wise decided to head for the CIS.

He joined the Rams halfway through the 2012-2013 season and he’s been Ryerson’s biggest offensive threat ever since.

He tallied eight goals and 14 points in 12 games during the 2012-2013 season and this year he’s leading the CIS with 40 points. Should his offensive output continue Wise could become the first Rams player ever to win the Senator Joseph A. Sullivan Trophy as the CIS player of the year.

“I’ve been working hard along with my two linemates, and they obviously help with the numbers,” he said. “I’m just happy to be here, and [the offence] just happens when you’re working hard and have good linemates to pick you up.”

The Rams head into the final five games of the regular season with a 15-8-0 record – it's the most wins ever accumlated by the team in a single season – and should they finish a win or two out of first place in the OUA West it will likely be hard not to look back to earlier in the season, when an error in judgment cost them what could end up being a valuable four points in the standings.

The Rams were suspended for seven days – they forfeited two games – in November after players were caught drinking on a pre-season road trip in New Jersey.

“It’s unfortunate,” coach Wise said. “We were in the wrong and we were given the penalty and you have to take what’s handed down to you and hopefully we learned from it.

“We’ve got a good group of guys here and nobody is perfect in this world. Sometimes I think all of us would like to go back and change some of the decisions we’ve made in our lives, but you can’t do that. You take what’s coming to you, learn from it and move forward. I think that’s what this team did and I give them full credit.”

The Rams won nine of their next 10 games, the type of run that would have been hard to imagine eight years ago when two or three wins a season was the status quo.

Jamie Wise was a teenager back then, really just settling into life as a high school student. He remembers his dad switching schools and recalls attending games that first season. “It was pretty terrible hockey to be honest,” Jamie said.

But he gives his dad plenty of credit for the work he’s put in and it’s finally beginning to pay off.

“It’s pretty impressive, he said. “ [Ryerson] teams used to go into seasons hoping to win three games and now we’re contending to be first in the West and try to make a run in the playoffs.”