Eleven seasons into his tenure behind the Regina Pats bench, Brad Herauf is hopeful the team’s first-round playoff exit this season is still just the beginning.
The Pats finished seventh in the Western Hockey League’s Eastern Conference in 2025-26, and returned to the postseason for the first time in three years but dropped their opening-round series in five games to the second-seeded Medicine Hat Tigers.
A 5-4 overtime loss April 4 sent the Tigers to the second round and ended Herauf’s third season as Regina’s head coach. He’d previously spent eight years as an assistant coach under bench bosses Dave Struch and John Paddock.
“I want to be here. I want to see this through,” Herauf said in a SportsCage interview Monday. “The last couple years have been real difficult, and I’ve done the difficult thing and now I want to be part of the fun and that’s the winning, and that’s the fruits of our labour.”
Regina qualified for playoffs with a 25-34-7-2 record despite losing seven of eight games to start the season and five straight to end the campaign. In between, the Pats won 24 of 55 games, including three of four over the third-place Edmonton Oil Kings and two of three in Saskatoon against the sixth-place Blades – two milestones Herauf pointed to as further signs of tangible progress.
“I think that’s one thing I’ve learned through those dry spells, even (going) 0-6 on the American trip (in November), it’s never as bad as you think and it’s probably never as good as you think,” he said. “You’re somewhere in the middle.
“For me, the criticism of us backing ourselves into the playoffs, it’s 68 games, the top eight teams with the most points get in, and we did,” Herauf continued. “We have a .500 record or more against the top half of the (conference) and that’s something we should be proud of, so I think we absolutely deserved to be in the playoffs and I think as a group we showed that against Medicine Hat.”
First-year general manager Dale Derkatch also put his stamp on the club, dialing down the level of player movement relative to the past two seasons. Regina traded away just three roster players in 2025-26, compared with a half dozen in each of the previous two years.
“Good organizations usually have some stability and … I just wanted to bring a calmness to the room and give the players somewhere they knew they could come, and they’re coming to work and feel good every day and not (a situation where) you walk into the dressing room and you see that so-and-so needs to go see the general manager and everybody’s always worried am I next to move or who’s moving where,” Derkatch told SportsCage.
“I just really wanted to bring that stability and I think that helped in terms of having the players focus on their game and they brought it.”
One of those players was over-age forward Caden Brown who led the Pats in scoring this season, setting career highs with 28 goals and 33 assists along the way.
Brown came to Regina in the November 2024 trade that sent Jaxsin Vaughan to the Everett Silvertips and has committed to Lindenwood University in the NCAA Division I ranks for 2026-27, where he figures to be one of the younger players on the club – similar to those he says he tried to mentor in his final major junior season.
“I think just coming to the rink every day and trying to include them and make them feel comfortable was a big part of it,” Brown told SportsCage. “When the young guys feel like they’re part of the team and comfortable to be themselves and do what they can do that’s when you get the most out of them.”
That’s another theme Derkatch would like to see continue in 2026-27.
“What I liked this year overall, I think I can count on one hand how many games I think maybe I didn’t feel the effort level was there from our team, so that makes me really happy that we came just about each and every night and gave it our best and gave ourselves a chance to be involved,” he said.
