Red Deer– It’s a moment both coach and player remember vividly. In the spring of 2014, Red Deer Rebels forward Vukie Mpofu walked into then-Head Coach Brent Sutter’s office for their end-of-season meeting. “We’re talking about the Memorial Cup team that following year and the role that he could he could fit into,” Sutter recalled. “I could just tell that his wheels are turning. I asked him, what does he really want? He says, I’m not sure if I want to continue to pursue playing and then he says, I want to go on and go to law school.”
“I felt so strongly about what it was that I wanted to do,” Mpofu said. “I think it was actually a bit of an easy decision after I had taken enough time to really think it through.” To be clear, the decision had nothing to do with a lack of passion for the game. Quite the opposite, actually. It had everything to do with the dream evolving in Mpofu’s mind as he grew up in Saskatoon.
The youngster had become obsessed with hockey after his first skating lessons at the age of four. It was new territory for his parents, Chris and Debbie, who had met in Zimbabwe before Chris’s education and work as a pediatric oncologist took them to England and the United Arab Emirates (where Vukie, the youngest of three sons, was born) before finally landing in Canada.
“Nobody in my family really had much of a hockey background,” Mpofu recalled. “Given that I was enjoying skating so much, and kind of begging every day to go back to the local rink, the ACT Arena in Saskatoon, which was maybe like, 10 minutes from our house. Compared to a lot of other kids, their parents were from Canada and their parents were kind of teaching them the sport, whereas in my case, I was kind of learning it with my mom and learning it with my dad together over the years as I was playing.
“I grew up watching the Saskatoon Blades all the time. I would go to games multiple times per week… For a lot of guys, the first dream before even getting to the NHL is playing in the Western Hockey League.” That dream would be realized sooner than Mpofu thought.