The Swift Current Broncos announced Dean DeSilva as their new Head Coach on Wednesday.
DeSilva has been an assistant coach with the Everett Silvertips for the past four seasons.
“Very excited,” said DeSilva after the announcement. “Obviously it’s a fantastic opportunity to be a head coach in the WHL and to have that opportunity in Swift Current I am very, very excited.”
“There’s a lot that I like about Dean,” said General Manager Chad Leslie. “It was a competitive process. We had a lot of really great applicants and a lot of really good presentations. He’s a worker for sure. He’s a guy that’s organized, detailed, very much about structure, comfortable at this age in his life that he’s comfortable in his own skill. I think he’s a guy that’s going to be focused on player relationships, development, and structure and I think that’s important for the direction I think our team’s going here.”
DeSilva will be taking over a young team that has will look very different from the past few seasons, especially amongst the forward ranks.
“Yes development is going to be huge because the landscape is changing,” he said. “We are going to have a very, very good D-core I think. They are still young, they had five guys that were under 18 or under 17 last year, but they are a year more experienced and that’s going to make a big difference. With losing so many top end players off the top couple lines it’s going to be a rebuild. So players are going to all want to come in and step in to different roles, but it’s going to be the development piece that’s going to be very, very important. Allow them to make mistakes. Work ethic is going to be key and every coach is going to come in and say they want to play with work ethic and pace and everything else. But for us, work ethic to me is a choice, that’s just a given. If they don’t work they don’t play. We’ll live with the mistakes and then correct them. It’s got to be that development that its just going to take steps moving forward as that landscape changes we want to put them into a situation in an environment that they want to stay and they want to grow together. That’s what the next couple years will all be about.”
