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There’s been crossover between lacrosse and hockey for as long as the sports have coexisted, but cracking a B.C. Jr. A line-up after three years of being out of the game? That’s different. That’s John Flatters. While in the process of recovering from an injury and plotting a return to the playoffs, the big defenseman talks being banned from lacrosse, his future in the sport, and what everyone assumed was the reason for his broken hand.

Not only is this your first year of Junior lacrosse, it’s also your last. Can you talk a bit about how that ended up happening?
I started playing in the WHL when I turned 17, and that summer I was coming from Notre Dame and I’d played lacrosse there but it wasn’t in a league or anything, it was almost intermural. When I signed with the team the owner, GM and coach–Brent Sutter, it was all one guy–he’s pretty intense and pretty scary at times. I asked him if we were allowed to play lacrosse in the offseason and he said ‘well, is there the opportunity to get hurt?’ and I said well I suppose, but I’ve never really been hurt playing lacrosse and he said ‘I don’t want you to get hurt and miss hockey.’ He didn’t come right out and say it but he sort of said, you know, ‘if you’re going to go play lacrosse that means you’re not as serious about playing here’ kind of thing. Without coming right out and saying it he got the message across: no lacrosse.

So that viewpoint was kind of specific to that coach. Because we see guys like Matt Wray or Kyle Wailes who have done both.
Yeah and I think there’s two others out West, [Mike] Krgovich actually played in Red Deer so I think he might have played for the other Sutter, the older brother Brian. Maybe by then it was different. There’s another guy who plays for Tri-City, Jarrett Toll, he plays for New West. I would have thought it was a bonus, like instead of going home to sit around and work out once a day for an hour and a half or something, go play lacrosse and keep playing sports and being in better shape than if you were just throwing some weights around.

Speaking of Matt Wray, as the story goes he approached you after a hockey game to gauge your interest in coming back to lacrosse. Was it something you’d been considering prior to speaking with him?
I’d always thought that there’s no way I could go and kind of run around or practice with a box team, but there was a really good field program in Calgary. The guy who ran it, I think it was Jim Burke, he was a really nice guy, really good to me, and I thought well maybe I’ll ask him if I can just sort of run around with the team, just run through practices. There’s next to no contact in field really, well in a game you’re slashing guys but in a practice you’re not going to two-hand your teammate, so I thought I might do that. But then last summer I ended up having to get surgery in the middle of June so that kind of stomped out that idea.

No offense, but not a lot of Jr. A teams would have been too thrilled to take on a player who hadn’t played in so long.
Absolutely. I’m convinced it couldn’t have come together like this for me with any other team. From Wray going out of his way to offer me the opportunity, to [co-GM] Forbes [Mitchell] and [co-GM and head coach] Tyson [Leies] being patient with me while I relearned the basics, to [team owner] Sean [Krause] providing me with a place to live and new equipment, there just aren’t a lot of organizations who would go out of their way like that for a player, let alone an unproven player.

I think Plan A for a lot of young guys in Canada is the NHL. What’s your Plan B looking like? Can you foresee a future in lacrosse?
Before speaking with Matt Wray, my next move was to go to university and start playing hockey there. I’d never really put it together. I thought I was too old and I was above the age for Junior lacrosse and everything just because I’d been out of the loop so long that I didn’t know. I assumed lacrosse was probably out of the picture for the rest of my young adulthood. But when Matt mentioned it and I was talking about it with my parents I thought if I came back and I was good enough to maybe get offered to play in the WLA or something, that would be perfect because I’d be finishing school and then I’d get to come out and work and play lacrosse out on the Island or something, out on the West coast. These past couple months I’ve started to think that’d be a pretty wicked deal. Play a little hockey and go to school in the winter, work and play lacrosse and work out in the summer.

Has the NLL crossed your mind at all? If you could get a look there?
Oh yeah, definitely. It’s like with any guy that plays their sport, if somebody came and offered them a spot in the pros they wouldn’t turn it down.

How’s your hand coming along?
It’s coming along pretty well. I think it happened on May 30th, May 31st or something, so it’s been a little over a month. It’s starting to get pretty close. I think it will be another week or two until I can start practicing and then maybe two to three, maximum four weeks until I can start playing again. I’m pretty confident that if I’m not able to play in the first round I’ll probably be able to play by the second round. We’ve got a pretty competent team, the stats don’t show it but when we want to play we can play and I think once playoffs start we’ll be able to take it pretty far.

I hear I wasn’t the only one that thought someone out there had a broken face to go along with your broken hand.
No, when I called my parents after the game they said the same thing. I said ‘I think I broke my hand’ and they said ‘well who did you fight?’ I said nobody, I didn’t fight anyone. All of my friends when I came home they’d ask what the big splint was for, and I’d say I broke my hand playing lacrosse and they’d say ‘playing lacrosse? Or fighting somebody?’

At the beginning of the season you were racking up an impressive number of penalty minutes. Do you feel like you were a marked man coming in because of your reputation in the WHL, or is that just your style of play?
I think for the most part–and I guess it was a good thing for me–I was really unknown coming in but with Matt Wray sort of being my bridge between the Western Hockey League and Junior A lacrosse, he’s done the whole program before and he knows how to transfer it so I kind of took a page out of his book. I noticed that he did get get into a couple of scraps, and he’s a really top-notch player too and he plays with a lot of fire, so I figured I played with a lot of fire in hockey and the last time I played competitive lacrosse I was the same way. It was back when nobody fought and nobody was getting too many penalties but we were still playing pretty rough and pretty mean. I just took what I would do in hockey and brought it to lacrosse.

Prior to the injury your penalty minutes had started to drop off. What do you attribute that to?
Part of it was that my parents came out to watch a weekend series, we played Coquitlam on the Sunday and another team on the Friday, and they said they didn’t want to come all the way out to see me sitting in the box or icing my hand all day. I guess that was part of it. And also as a team we were doing well, we always kept ourselves in games, but the thing that shot us in the foot was that we took too many penalties. I really tried to limit the stupid penalties and the lazy penalties, like holding or slashing. I might have only had maybe three or four minor penalties.

People focus so much on the tough-guy aspect of your game. Are there other things you wish people would notice about you?
The whole thing like with hockey is that it’s so easy to get labelled, and I think I did get labelled a little bit early on, either because I didn’t get a chance or I just didn’t have the opportunity to expand my game in other spots. I’ve always thought of myself as a really good leader and that was what I tried to bring to lacrosse. You can bring any guy off the street and put a stick in his hands and he can whack somebody, but it’s getting to looseballs and picking up looseballs first and coming on and off the floor really hard and keeping the rest of the guys always on the same page vocally. When you’re the older guy on the team whether you’ve played the game or not you have to show a bit of leadership and maturity.

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