With Jeff Odgers stepping down as head coach of the Yorkton Harvest to focus on family and his farm, the Yorkton Harvest were quick to go in house with their hire naming Odgers assistant Dan Cross as their head coach for the 2013-14 SMAAAHL season.
With spring camp this weekend, team president Garth Simms mentioned the importance of having a head coach in place for the spring camp and the summer to help with the recruiting process of the club who boast 130 players who are Harvest hopefuls at their 2013 camp, "With the amount of players coming to spring camp we felt the need to establish a continuity in finding Jeff's replacement right away and fortunately we found a familiar face waiting in the wings to help us out and a veteran in Yorkton Minor Hockey" says Simms.
Simms made sure it was known that Odgers resignation from the team was mutual and was only because of Odgers desire to have more time to spend on family, time that the busy SMAAAHL schedule took up over the past year. "Jeff spends a lot of his time as a farmer, and between being at the Farrell Agencies Arena every day and the busy road weekend schedule of our league he had little time left for sleep, let alone for his family so Jeff made the difficult decision to resign to spend more time with his family" says Simms.
Cross was the 2010 Yorkton Minor Hockey coach of the year and was formerly the coach of the SFMAAAHL Fox Fm Prairie Fire as well as being the assistant on the Harvest team that had an exciting second half of the 2012/13 season where the team bounced back from a dismal start to being amongst the league's best in the second half of the season before falling in a final fifth game to the Regina Pat Canadians in the first round of the playoffs. Cross at the announcement at the Yorkton Minor Hockey banquet said he relishes the opportunity to carry over last year's success, "We have some great young players coming in and with the success of Yorkton Minor Hockey this year as well as with out club hopefully we can also bring a banner home to Yorkton in the near future."
As for Jeff Odgers, Simms wanted to thank Odgers for the hard work he put into the program last season and insisted that Odgers will remain a supporter and asset of the Harvest organization. Harvest spring camp is this weekend where Cross will be looking at who he will invite to tryout camp.
