Newfoundland native going pro

Bay Roberts’ Zack Bennett inks first professional hockey deal

Every young hockey player dreams of one day playing professional hockey.

Often that dream is to reach the National Hockey League, but that isn’t the only professional hockey league in the world.

For Bay Roberts defenceman Zack Bennett, that pro hockey dream is taking him to Sweden.

Earlier this week, the 20-year-old inked his first professional contract with the Söderhamn/ljusne Hockey Club in Sweden.

“It felt really good (to sign),” Bennett said. “Junior has been a lot of hard work and it’s good to see something come out of it.”

The Söderhamn/ljusne HC — a Division 2 team based in Ljusne, Sweden — is just a two-hour drive from Stockholm and represents the latest hockey stop for Bennett.

In 2017, he was drafted by the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League’s Drummondville Voltigeurs. After a handful of games there, he was traded to the Acadiebathurst Titan where he won a Memorial Cup in 2017.

The next season was spent in the Maritime Hockey League with the Yarmouth Mariners in 2018-2019 where he played in 16 games. F

rom there, hockey took him to the Campbellton Tigers in 2019-2020 before he spent this past year with the Truro Bearcats.

The deal came together quickly after Bennett’s season with the Maritime Hockey League’s Truro Bearcats abruptly ended.

He still had some eligibility left, so there was a chance he could head to a university and play there. Then, the offer came from Sweden and it was an easy decision from there.

Aside from hockey, Bennett is looking forward to getting a chance to see a new piece of the world. It will be his first trip across the Atlantic Ocean.

“It felt too good to pass up,” he said.

While Bennett has been going away for hockey since he was 15 years old, it doesn’t get any easier on his parents.

For the last several years, Bo and Lisa Bennett have been planning their weeks around when their son was playing at the time.

“All of those years have prepared us for this,” Bo said on Zack’s latest hockey stop.

As weird as it sounds, the pandemic has also played a bit of a role in helping Bo and his wife adjust to not being able to be at games.

The travel shutdown and subsequent restrictions meant they were watching more of his games online instead of in-person and Facetime took the place of the usual face-toface visits.

“It’s always nice when you see some version of your hard work paying off,” said Bo. “He’s been training, playing and training more his whole life. He’s had some setbacks along the way with injuries and stuff, which was tough on all of us, but at the end of the day, he’s kept his head down and kept working away.

“It’s paying off for him right now.”

Zack will be putting in a lot of work this summer inside the BR8K Away Hockey training gym, which is owned by his family.

It’ll be some of the most important work he has put in during his hockey career as he prepares for his first season as a professional.

“I’m down in the gym every day,” said Zack.

While he is training, the highlights of his career and the careers of some of his teammates are featured on the walls of the gym.

There are clippings of Shailynn Snow, who won a World U-18 gold medal with Team Canada in 2019, and Halifax Moosehead’s Kyle Petten, Luke Akerman and others.

Amongst the others is Dawson Mercer, a recent New Jersey Devil draft pick and World Junior gold medal winner. Mercer and Zack are cousins and this is just another thing they’ll be sharing.

They all came through the system together. As one of their coaches, Bo saw each of them grow from the earliest stages of hockey and now they’ve each left their mark in their way.

“They’ve never disappointed me and now they’re adults and now they’re still pushing the barrier for kids coming out of the Bay Arena and kids coming out of our program,” said Bo, who coached all of them at BR8K Away Hockey. “It’s really cool for sure.”

On top of his coaches in Bay Roberts, Zack was sure to pay homage to the Truro Bearcat organization for how much they’ve helped his game.

In their way, they’ve helped prepare him for this next step on his journey.

“(The Bearcats) did so much for me and they really helped me show myself this year and that’s really where all of this came from,” he said.