Chilliwack gets its WHL team back, and the BCHL loses its barn

The WHL found the right people for Chilliwack, and the Fraser Valley just picked a side in junior hockey's new war. The league approved its 24th franchise on Wednesday, a group run by Jeremy Colliton and Mason Raymond, to start play in 2027-28 at the Chilliwack Coliseum.

By our count, that ends a 16-season gap. The Chilliwack Bruins left after 2010-11 and became the Victoria Royals. The town has waited a long time for the league to come back, and it nearly waited longer.

How it almost slipped

The WHL announced Chilliwack in March 2025, alongside Penticton. In October 2025 it pushed the debut back a year. Then the first ownership group, led by Matthew Gibbons, fell apart in May after it couldn't reach a deal with the city on the Coliseum.

Commissioner Dan Near summed up the delay plainly: "It was never a question about whether people would want this team. It was about finding the right people."

He's right, and the people are the story. Colliton will be the governor, the general manager and the head coach. That's a lot of hats, but he has worn the biggest ones already. He coached parts of four seasons behind the Blackhawks bench.

Then came two years with the Abbotsford Canucks, where he went 40-25-3-4 and 40-25-5-2 and won a playoff round each spring. He spent the last two seasons as a Devils assistant before leaving in June.

Raymond played 10 NHL seasons, six in Vancouver, including the 2011 run to the Cup Final and a 27-goal year in 2009-10. He and Colliton are both from the Calgary area and have played together since they were nine. Brett Motherwell, a former Boston College defenseman, Mario Amantea and Patrick Lathrop round out the group.

The barn, and who it pushes out

The team plays in the B.C. Division of the Western Conference, in a city-owned building that opened in 2004 with two NHL-sized sheets. The BCHL's Chilliwack Chiefs play there now. Their owner, Moray Keith, plans to keep the Chiefs going at another rink once the WHL club moves in as the main tenant.

That's the part I'd underline. For years the BCHL sold itself as the route to college hockey, because CHL players couldn't play NCAA hockey. That ended on Aug. 1, 2025, when CHL players became eligible for Division I.

The best pitch the Chiefs had is gone, and now the WHL is taking their building too. Nobody's chasing the Chiefs out of town, but the junior game in the Valley just tilted.

The Penticton blueprint

If you want to know what a smart expansion club can do in this league, look at Penticton. The Vees won 38 games in their first WHL season, a CHL record for an expansion team, broke the old mark of 37 set by the 1982-83 Longueuil Cavaliers, and reached the Western Conference final.

Chilliwack has a coach with an NHL résumé and an owner who scored 27 goals in a Canucks sweater. It has an expansion draft and a prospects draft in the spring of 2027 to build the roster, and no name yet.

Kessler's call

Chilliwack finishes .500 or better in year one. Colliton has coached pros for most of the last decade, and an expansion draft rewards the guy who knows exactly which 19-year-old he wants. Penticton showed it can be done. I'll take the guy who has already run an NHL bench to pull it off.