It seems wherever Justin Fillion pops up as a hockey coach, success follows.
It started when his playing days as a pro hockey defenceman ended three seasons ago and he returned to his Prince George hometown to lead the Coast Inn of the North Cougars to consecutive provincial championships, one as an assistant coach and the other as head coach.
Last season he joined the staff of the Cariboo Cougars as an assistant and helped the major midget Cats reach the league championship series.
Next season Fillion will try to keep up his winning ways calling the shots behind the bench of the Northern Capitals in the B.C. Hockey Female Midget Triple-A League. B.C. Hockey announced this week that Fillion will succeed Megan Price as head coach.
The 28-year-old Fillion, a former Prince George Spruce King who played four seasons of NCAA Division 1 college hockey at Michigan Tech and one season of minor pro with the Pensacola Ice Flyers, hopes to make the Capitals the provincial powerhouse they were during the tenure of head coach Mario Desjardins, who left the team in the spring of 2016 after getting the Capitals to back-to-back regional championships.
"It's definitely something that will be new to me for sure but I'm excited for the challenge and really looking forward to bringing the program back to where it was," Fillion said.
"I do coach a lot of these girls in the PGSS hockey program and they've been bugging me about applying and so have some of the parents. Cariboo has some strong coaches and Tyler Brough has been doing a great job there and that kind of opened the door for me to try this and build another program to have success in Prince George."
Recruiting is his top priority now and he plans to host tryout sessions leading up to main camp in August to try to convince more northern players to come to Prince George to play for the Capitals - an alternative to playing in the pricey hockey academies in the southern half of the province.
"With all the girls in northern B.C. we're more than capable of competing with the best teams and I look forward to going out and making the phone calls and hosting little ID camps to try to attract these girls back to Prince George," he said.
The Capitals, who joined the league when it formed in 2009, took their lumps the first four seasons but then went on a run of three consecutive dominant seasons from 2013-16, capturing the league playoff championship in 2015 and 2016. The Caps finished a respectable third in 2016-17 but had a tough season in 2017-18, placing fifth in the five-team league with a 6-26-0 record.
Neither Price nor assistant coach Scott Fanshaw will return to the Capitals next season but Fillion is trying to retain Dayle Poulin as an assistant coach.
"It was a tough decision to leave Cariboo - I played for them, I won a championship with them (in 2008), and helped them coach last year and coming so close makes decisions like this even more tough," Fillion said. "But at the end of the day, my intentions are to build this girls program back to where it was and promote these 17-year-old girls that are coming into their last season so hopefully they'll have a job and can get scholarships at universities in Canada or the States."
In addition to his minor hockey coaching experience Fillion has worked with School District 57 and its Aboriginal Development Centre, which led to him being named head coach for the B.C. team at the recent aboriginal national championship. He's had some great mentors along the way, including PGSS hockey program coach Renzo Berra; Ryan Howse, the head coach his first season with the Coast Inn Cougars; and Brough, the current head coach of the Cariboo Cougars. Fillion says he's not ruling out the possibility of becoming a career hockey coach.
