When Greg Morris heard St. Thomas University was cutting the men’s hockey team the former player was more than upset.
He believed campus life would suffer a blow, and the fact the team wasn’t winning could have been fixed.
“It’s hard to judge from the outside. I’m removed from it, but my heart isn’t removed from it,” said Morris.
Morris has recently been inducted into the STU Tommies Wall of Fame, and in his award speech, he said cutting the team was a big mistake and believed it should be reversed.
He said there are many other ways to start the team back up and play against schools in another league. He believed schools like STU could then give high school students a chance to play hockey and get an education, when they may not be able to do so at other bigger universities.
When The Aquinian interviewed Ed MacDermaid, a STU alumnus and recent Wall of Fame inductee in October, he said most of the Atlantic universities do not look for kids coming out of high school. They wanted players with more experience.
“It’s difficult to compete when all of the other schools have 23 and 24-year-olds all [Quebec Junior Major Hockey League] or [Ontario Hockey League] players and so on,” said MacDermaid.
Morris said after he gave his speech at the Wall of Fame induction luncheon, people thanked him and wanted to start a movement to bring back the team. He believes if the students rose up then maybe the university would look at bringing the team back.
He said he was never informed the team was being cut, and he believes economics were the biggest factor in cutting the team. He said he knows running the team was expensive, but he thinks it was cut at the expense of the students.
“It was a big loss to the university community, and myself. We’re Canadians, and I know STU was known as an underdog, but I think there were leagues they could have competed in.”
