Jeremy Wick is making a name for himself playing professional hockey in Switzerland.
The Grand Valley native helped his team, Genève-Servette Hockey Club, win the Spengler Cup in Davos, Switzerland on Dec. 31.
The Spengler Cup is an annual European hockey tournament played between Christmas and New Year’s Eve in Davos, Switzerland. Six teams participated this year, including a team from Canada.
Wick moved to Switzerland in July and hasn’t yet played a full season in the country, but that hasn’t prevented him from getting noticed. While playing in National League B with Red Ice in Martigny, Switzerland earlier in the season, Wick said he gained confidence.
“I was leading the team in points and playing lots of minutes and it was a huge confidence booster for myself and then I got called up, or Geneva needed me for a game here and there, and I was doing well with them as well,” he explained.
On Dec. 23, just a day before Genève-Servette HC was to leave for the Spengler Cup, Wick was told he would be joining the team in the tournament.
“When they told me I was going up I wasn’t sure if I would play all of the games or how much ice time I would get but I ended up playing all four games and got a fair amount of ice time playing on the fourth line for [coach Chris] McSorley,” Wick said. “So it was really exciting and a pretty surreal experience.”
Not only did Wick get significant ice time, but former coach Jim Church, current vice president and technical director for the Grand Valley and District Minor Hockey Association, said Wick may have changed the momentum of the final game in the Spengler Cup against Salavat Yulaev Ufa, a Russian team.
“The ‘D’ man was skating out of the zone and I kind of caught up and put a pretty good hit on him and he went down to the ice and I ended up falling over too and the puck kind of left the zone and I was skating up the zone and I looked over and one of their other guys I guess didn’t like the hit because … their defender, stayed down for a little bit,” Wick explained.
“So he came over and gave me a cross check and there was a big scuffle and we ended up getting a power play out of it and scored on that power play to give us the lead and we never looked back and we controlled the play from there on out.”
Wick was excited the play was in the TV network recap of the championship game.
Church said Jeremy has an innate skill to know just when to check a player, an instinct that has been present throughout his hockey career, even at a young age.
“He out-thinks and out-hits and the physicality of his game, he’s well prepared for,” Church explained. “He doesn’t play dirty, he doesn’t hit dirty, he hits before the other guy can hit him and he’s used that science and the ability to separate the man from the puck as one of his … strong points.
“Canadian Hockey players, everybody can skate, shoot and pass and everything else, but you’ve got to have something else, something that separates you from the pack and that one thing is one of his biggest assets.”
Wick said he started out playing on a Grand Valley Tyke select team when he was just six or seven years old.
There Wick was given the opportunity for more ice time than he would have received in a larger centre.
“In a small town you end up having eight, 10 or 12 members on a team, versus 17, so what happens is if you have 10 kids on a team they’re on the ice one third more than the team of 15,” Church said.
Wick eventually moved on to play ‘AAA’ for the Halton Hurricanes. When it was time to move to
the junior level he played one year in Orangeville and three years in Georgetown. He said he was never drafted for the Ontario Hockey League, but he also made the decision early on that he was going to focus on getting a hockey scholarship.
Wick succeeded and attended St. Lawrence University in New York state, playing hockey with the school for four years.
Wick’s mother and father both have Swiss heritage so he grew up with dual Swiss/Canadian citizenship. From the time he was playing in junior he was being recruited to potentially play for a Swiss team. When he graduated from St. Lawrence University Wick was offered a contract with Geneva and he doesn’t plan to stop playing for the league any time soon.
“As long as I keep being successful and enjoy it and my health allows me to keep going I don’t plan on spending any winters in Canada, anyway, in the next couple of years,” Wick said. He actually faced the Canadian team in the semi-finals of the Spengler Cup.
“It was cool being able to play against Canada because I never was actually selected for any of the national teams or anything like that so it was cool kind of playing against a Canadian team,” he said.
“I knew a lot of my friends and family back home would be watching that game because there was even more interest, not just me playing but against a Canadian team, so that was exciting.”
Even in the middle of his international hockey career, Wick still fondly recalls Grand Valley hockey.
“As I got older, Jim would invite me and the other guys playing ‘AAA’ or juniors to come back and kind of demonstrate or be leaders helping them along, teaching the younger kids so it was always nice to always come back to where I came from and try to help out the younger kids and pass on some of my experiences and things like that,” Wick said.
Church explained the Grand Valley system is trying to do “is to get the right start to hockey development at a young age.” He said, “Absolutely key to developing hockey players like a Jeremy Wick is to get a right start to coaching, the right start to player development at the early age so they learn the right way.”
