VIJHL Opens 2026-27 Season Friday: Three Games to Watch

The Glacier Kings don’t hit the ice until Saturday, but the Vancouver Island Junior Hockey League’s season begins a night early. Three games open the 2026-27 campaign on Friday, September 4, and each one carries its own storyline into the year. Here’s what to watch as the puck drops on a new season.

Victoria Cougars at Saanich Predators

The Cougars open defense of their VIJHL championship with a familiar face back behind the bench. Mike Vandekamp, who led Victoria to its first title since 2019 and ninth overall, second only to Campbell River’s ten, left this offseason to take over the 15U prep program at Pacific Coast Hockey Academy. Replacing him is Craig Didmon, who is no stranger to the building. Didmon ran the Cougars as GM and head coach from 2002 to 2007 before crossing town to the Victoria Grizzlies of the BCHL, where he spent parts of two decades on the bench, including a full time run as GM and head coach starting in 2014-15 that produced semifinal appearances in 2017 and 2019 and a Port Alberni pod title during the pandemic shortened 2021 season. Now he’s back where he started, nearly twenty years later, inheriting a team that just won it all.

He also inherits a group still adjusting to life without a home rink of its own. The concrete floor rebuild at Archie Browning Sports Centre was originally expected to wrap by late August. It’s now looking like the end of November, so Victoria opens the year scattered across three different buildings, four home games at Save-On-Foods Memorial Centre, two in Sooke at SeaParc Arena, and one at the Naden rink, before finally getting back into their own barn. And in net, there’s no clear sign that Finn Wilson, who started all 12 of Victoria’s playoff games last spring and posted a .932 save percentage along the way, is still with the club. New coach, new goaltending situation, no home ice to speak of until deep into the fall.

On the other bench, Saanich is searching for any sign of the identity that once made them contenders. Cody Carlson, still the Predators’ head coach and general manager, took over partway through the 2021-22 season with a team that had just missed the playoffs, and within two years had it rebuilt into a finalist, falling in the 2023 VIJHL final to Oceanside. The very next season, Carlson’s group went all the way and won the championship. Since then it has completely fallen apart. Saanich has gone 10-35-3 in back to back seasons, missing the playoffs in 2024-25 and getting knocked out in the division semifinal last spring. Carlson is still building, and hosting the reigning champs on opening night is as good a gut check as any for how much of that 2023-24 magic he has left to work with.

Lake Cowichan Kraken at Nanaimo Buccaneers

No team in the league has more to prove than Nanaimo, and for once that’s a compliment. The Buccaneers, who returned to the VIJHL as an expansion franchise in 2012, had never been to a league final until last spring, when they swept Campbell River and then knocked out Comox Valley in six games to reach the championship round for the first time in franchise history. They pushed Victoria to five games before falling, the deepest playoff run the Buccaneers have ever had. The problem is the two players most responsible for getting them there are gone. Nate Barclay, who led all VIJHL defencemen in playoff scoring and was named the league’s top defenceman, and Madden Cruickshank, the reigning Rookie of the Year, have both graduated to the BCHL with the Nanaimo Clippers. Coach Tyler Gow is back, and so is a fanbase that just watched its team come closer to a title than it ever has, but replacing that much production is the real question of opening night.

There’s also a wrinkle to the calendar, though not quite the one it first appeared to be. Nanaimo’s home games have been a Thursday night fixture since the franchise’s founding in 2012. That started to change last season, when the Buccaneers moved their home opener to a Saturday, a move general manager Bill Bestwick called the first weekend home opener in the modern era of the program. This year the Bucs have settled on Friday as their standing home night, and Friday’s opener against Lake Cowichan is the first real test of that becoming the new normal at the Nanaimo Ice Centre.

Lake Cowichan, meanwhile, is still looking for the version of itself that briefly showed up in 2024-25. The Kraken made the playoffs that season for the first time since joining the league in 2021, only to be swept by Campbell River in the first round. Instead of building on it, they slid backward last year to a 14-31-1 finish and missed the postseason entirely. They open the year with yet another new face behind the bench in Dan Lemmon, continuing a run of coaching turnover that has followed the franchise for most of its short history. For a team still searching for its first real playoff push, a trip to a Nanaimo squad replacing its two best players is as good a chance as any to steal a game early.

Westshore Wolves at Peninsula Panthers

Westshore just had the best regular season in franchise history, and the coach who built it is gone. Mike Nesbitt, hired in July 2025, led the Wolves to a 34-9-4-0 record and 72 points, seven better than any Westshore team before it. The playoffs told a different story, as the eventual league champion Cougars knocked Westshore out in five games in the South semifinal. Nesbitt and the organization mutually parted ways this offseason, with Nesbitt saying it was time to move into a higher level of hockey after five years in the VIJHL, the last four of which, from 2019 to 2023, were actually spent behind the Comox Valley bench, where he went 105-63-3-6 as Glacier Kings coach.

In comes Brian Passmore, who spent this past season as head coach and GM of the BCHL’s Surrey Eagles before stepping down in April after an 8-40-6 season and a move to Victoria. Passmore’s coaching career actually started in the VIJHL, as an assistant with Peninsula back in 2012-13. One of the defencemen on that Panthers roster was Grayson Vickers, who is now Peninsula’s head coach and just won VIJHL Coach of the Year. Friday’s opener puts Passmore back in the building where he started, on the other side of the bench from a player he once coached.

Peninsula, meanwhile, is trying to turn a nearly perfect regular season into something more. The Panthers went 37-7-3-0 last year, won the Hebenton Trophy as the league’s top regular-season team, and looked every bit the favorite until Victoria erased a 3-1 series deficit in the South Division final, closing it out in a seven-game thriller that included a pregame power outage at Panorama Recreation Centre. Vickers has the Panthers positioned to be a contender again, and hosting a Westshore team replacing its own most successful coach in team history is the kind of opener that should tell you plenty about both.

Three games, three different storylines, and not a single one involving the team we actually cover. That changes Saturday, when the Glacier Kings open their own season at home against Campbell River. Preview coming tomorrow.