'I just couldn't let it go': Canada's oldest hockey player wins national championships at age 88

Austin Smith, 88, is hockey’s eldest national champion. He was part of an Edmonton over-80 team that won the nationals last spring.

I sat down with Smith recently to ask some questions about his many decades in the game he’s still playing this 2026-27 season.

Smith said he grew up playing shinny on outdoor rinks and sloughs in his hometown of Sedgewick, before playing organized midget hockey in Camrose, where his team won the provincial “B” championship.

He next played in the Red Wings minor hockey system for the Edmonton Maple Leafs team. He went on to play two years with the Edmonton Oil Kings, then was on five Canada West championship teams at the University of Alberta. He was offered a try-out with the Detroit Red Wings, but turned it down in favour of a job with Canadian Pacific Railways in Montreal.

He’s never missed a season of playing in adult hockey leagues. Smith has been a member of Vintage hockey — Edmonton’s premier seniors hockey league, and one that annually produces team that win age group national championship teams — for almost as long as there’s been Vintage hockey.

On his youth hockey, Smith said: “We started on the sloughs in the fall of the year, and then when they finally got around to put ice in the outdoor rink, we we got to play there pretty much whenever we wanted. We cleaned it off a lot too… Every time there was a big dump of snow, we had to clean it off mostly ourselves… That was quite the experience. Colder than hell.”

Do you have a favourite player of all time?

“Gordie Howe was always my idol… He was a phenomenon.”

The best player he ever played with? Vern Pachal at the U of A, whose grandson Brayden plays for the Calgary Flames, he said.

“Vern was fabulous. He came out of pro. He quit the pro ranks after some years in the Quebec League, and then ended up at Springfield under Eddie Shore, so that finished him… I got to play right wing with him. That’s the only time I ever played wing. It was unbelievable. One of the best years of my whole life. He was a cut above everybody in the Western Canada Athletic Association… I had a really good year that year playing playing with him, and I helped him a lot too. We just seem to fit. There’s some guys you play with, it just works that way… I think you get two guys with their heads in the same space, so they know what they’re doing. They know what each other are doing all the time.”

His best coach?

“Clare Drake. Fantastic. He was an innovator, and he tried lots of different things. He was a student of the game. He was learning all the time and trying new drills, adjusting the systems all the time. But he was a systems guy basically. You played a tight system under Drake. If you didn’t, you sat on the end of the bench watching. The whole thing was all mapped out, and he adjusted as the years went on… In Drake’s scheme of things, the effort and the commitment had to be number one. He had lots of guys who were floaters. They were down playing with the Junior Bears. They had lots of talent, probably more talent than I had or some other guys. You know, in terms of putting a puck in, that stuff like that. But they didn’t want any much to do with the rest of it, which was damn hard work, you know, checking, back checking.”
He started playing Vintage hockey when it was just one team playing shinny at Mill Woods Rec Centre, organized by Orville Burchby.

Smith said he hadn’t had many hockey injuries over the years. How did he avoid them?

“Stayed out of the corners for starters,” he said, with a chuckle. “No, it’s just most of us just keeping your head up and avoiding trouble. You see it coming, but there’s some there’s some places you can’t avoid it. And you got to take a hit. And that’s the one thing about Dicky (Dunnigan, his long-time Vintage linemate and a former All-American at Michigan State). He and I just saw everything the same on the ice all time. He made more damn plays along the boards, where a big bruising defenseman was coming at him hard, and he’d just stand there, turn his body a little bit, make the pass, take the hit, come out like nothing happened. They didn’t stop him.”

Smith said he has not played much on Vintage teams at tournaments and national championships.

“I just lost the interest in traveling all the way to Quebec City or Montreal or wherever they were going to hold these things. I didn’t want to do that. Although I got reintroduced to it here in the tail-end of my time, like last spring when we went to Calgary and we won our 80-and-over category. We never lost a game. (Goalie Bob) Tessier was unreal. In three games he let in one goal.”

In the last few years, Smith has played with a sore hip. It made it so difficult for him to pivot, he had to sit out the last two months of the Vintage season in 2024-25. A doctor told him he needed hip replacement surgery, but it would take up to a year to get it. Smith got a second opinion from an old U of A Golden Bears connection, orthopedic surgeon Dave Otto, then took Otto’s recommendation to try rehabbing the hip.

Smith started going twice a week to the Good Life Gym and worked with two rehab specialists, who promised him they’d get him right so he could play hockey in the fall of 2025. Along with gym work, he did a series of hip mobility and strengthening exercises for 15 to 20 minutes every day.

“The hip was getting slowly better, slowly better, slowly better. And when I started Vintage last fall, went out there and skated, had some issues, but just found the right exercises and stretches and stuff… This was a this was just a total eye opener to me. I’m walking around still playing hockey, or trying to, and there’s guys that are waiting for on the list for for hip surgeries, which I would have been right in that category if I hadn’t taken it on myself to go look and see what can happen.”

He said this year may be his last.

“I think my goal is to last one more year if I’m lucky.”

How about playing until you are 90?

“Well, it’s crossed my mind, but it seems to me artificial. What’s the magic about 90? I think when the time comes, you’ll know. Like this winter is going to be a testing year for me. I’ll have to go play forward… Let’s say that I have a kind of a year where I can’t quite keep up, where I can’t make some good passes, or my shooting deteriorates to such a point that I can’t even hit the net, stuff like that.”

Why has he kept playing all these years?

“Oh, I couldn’t let it go. I just couldn’t let it go. The fall would roll around. What am I going to do all winter? I just I had to go play hockey. But I missed a bunch of the guys that are no longer around that passed away or they thad to quit or they wanted to quit… It’s tough looking at new guys all the time that you’re getting used to. But I’ve enjoyed everybody, especially these (Vintage hockey) Group Three Black guys that I play with. I enjoy all of them.”