OHL Alumni Central

At the start of March, we did a post on Ontario Hockey League alumni playing in the Australian Ice Hockey League (click here to view post). One of the players was Brad Smulders and we’d just like to add an update on this former Sarnia Sting.

Brad is signed on for the 2010 season with the Gold Coast Blue Tongues of the AIHL. The season starts in about 4 weeks, in time for the Australian winter. Last season, Brad was the league’s scoring champion with a remarkable 3.5 points per game. Expectations are no less for the upcoming season.

Brad has just finished up the winter season in the Netherlands with Romijnders Devils Nijmegen. Not the leading scorer in this league. In fact, Brad was 5th in team scoring but still was slightly over a point a game in a higher calibre league with more than twice the number of games on the schedule.

The team was the best during the regular season and just recently won the playoff championships with a sweep over Destil Trapper Tilburg.

As mentioned in the previous post, Brad only played 17 games over his OHL career. This still makes him a product of the league and a true measure of how far reaching the OHL is in the hockey world.

To view Brad Smulders profile page on the Devils official website, click here.

To check out the Gold Coast Blue Tongues roster page, click here.

David Cornacchia played in the Ontario Hockey League from 1997-98 to 2000-01. He started his career with the Sudbury Wolves and was traded to the Sarnia Sting in 1998-99. The next season, 1999-00, David was traded from the Sting to the Belleville Bulls where he finished out his OHL career.

Cornacchia has fallen off the face of the hockey world, according to hockeydb.com. However, we’ve tracked him down playing in the Netherlands for Destil Trappers Tilburg (Tilburg Trappers). In the Dutch league, David is a point per game defenceman on a team that is in the top three of an eight team league.

Along the way, David has had stints in the ECHL, AHL, CHL, Germany’s DEL and Austria’s Erste Bank Eishockey Liga. The journey from the OHL to the Dutch league placed him on 10 different teams in 4 countries.

To view David Cornacchia’s profile page on the Tilburg Trappers official website, click here. The site is in Dutch, but, as we’ve said before, hockey on the internet is pretty universal. If you need help with a translation, you can always try Google Translate (just google it). There will be a Dutch language guide coming out on OHL Alumni Central. Currently there is just a German one with more to come.