Voltigeurs De Drummondville

A regiment's name on a 1963 rink

Drummondville, an industrial town on the Saint-François between Montreal and Quebec City, has had major junior hockey since 1982, when the Voltigeurs joined the Quebec league as an expansion franchise. The name is borrowed from the Canadian Voltigeurs, a Quebec regiment that fought in the War of 1812 — an unusually literal piece of local history for a hockey club, and one the town has kept for forty-four years.

Home has always been the Centre Marcel-Dionne, which opened in 1963 as the Centre Civique and was later renamed in honour of Marcel Dionne. It holds 4,000, of which 3,038 are seats; the rest stand. By the standards of the league that is neither the largest building nor the smallest, and its age shows in the way the crowd sits close to the glass rather than above it.

Two cups, four trips to the Memorial

For its first quarter-century the club was a finalist rather than a winner. Drummondville reached the President's Cup final in 1986, 1988 and 1991 and lost all three. Both near-misses that mattered came with a national tournament attached: the Voltigeurs went to the 1988 Memorial Cup in Chicoutimi as league runner-up and finished fourth, then returned in 1991 in Quebec City and reached the final, where Spokane beat them.

The first title came in 2009, a seven-game President's Cup series won 4-3 against the Shawinigan Cataractes. At the Memorial Cup in Rimouski that spring the Voltigeurs reached the semi-final and lost to the Windsor Spitfires, the eventual champions.

The second title is the one the current building is still trading on. On 14 May 2024 Drummondville beat the Baie-Comeau Drakkar 4-3 at the Centre Marcel-Dionne to complete a 4-0 sweep of the final, after wins of 5-0, 1-0 and 6-2. Sam Oliver scored twice in the closing game, with Ethan Gauthier and Matteo Rotondi adding the others; the Voltigeurs outshot Baie-Comeau 30-26, went two-for-three on the power play and killed all four Drakkar attempts. The Memorial Cup that followed, in Saginaw, Michigan, ended with a fourth-place finish.

The alumni ledger

Junior clubs are judged partly on who passed through, and Drummondville's list is better than its two championships suggest. Daniel Brière, Derick Brassard and Sean Couturier all played in the Centre Marcel-Dionne before long NHL careers; more recently Dawson Mercer and the goaltender Jake Allen came out of the same room. Eight numbers hang retired in the building, Brassard's 61 among them.

That pipeline is still the club's main business. On 26 October 2026 NHL Central Scouting published its first list of players to watch for the next draft — more than 400 names across North America and Europe, 53 of them from the Quebec league — and five were Voltigeurs: the Slovak defenceman Filip Kovalčík and the Czech goaltender Jan Láryš, both graded C, plus goaltender Mathys Fortin, defenceman Cooper Campbell and forward Dérik Morin in the later-round range.

New bench, same system

The coaching staff turned over after last season. Sylvain Favreau, who built the defensive structure the club had been winning with, left for the AHL's Syracuse Crunch, and his assistant Mathieu Gravel was promoted to head coach. The 2025-26 team had finished third in the Western Conference despite being picked for the bottom half before the season, then lost a first-round series to Val-d'Or in five games.

Gravel inherited most of that roster. Louis-Félix Bourque, Renard Poulin, Dylan Dumont, Kovalčík, Yoan Tassé and Láryš all returned; the overage players Jesse Allecia, Matteo Rotondi and Marc-Olivier Beaudry aged out, and the import Sebastian Taliga was taken 69th in the import draft. The Hockey News, previewing the season on 5 September 2026, described a very similar team trying to repeat a defensive result without the man who designed it — which is more or less what the first two months have looked like.

Where they stand in November 2026

The start was rough. On 25 September at the Glencore Arena in Rouyn-Noranda the Voltigeurs lost 6-0 to the Huskies, trailing 2-0 after a period and giving up three more in the second; Mathys Fortin made 28 saves before being pulled. Special teams decided it — nothing from two Drummondville power plays, three goals from three Rouyn-Noranda chances. Gravel's assessment afterwards was blunt: the team was going through a storm, and all twenty-three players and the staff would have to turn it round together.

A month later there was something to build on. On 24 October, in front of roughly 1,900 at the Centre Marcel-Dionne, Drummondville beat the Moncton Wildcats 3-1 with goals from Hugo Dufour and two from Yoan Tassé, the second into an empty net. Kovalčík assisted on all three; Láryš stopped 17 of 18; the shot count was 36-18 and the referees called a single penalty all night. Gravel called it the team's best performance in every phase since the season opened. The win moved the Voltigeurs to 4-6-0-2.

Gravel then left. He had been named an assistant coach with Canada's Under-17 White team for a second straight year, with a development camp near Toronto in July and the World Under-17 Challenge in Oakville, Ontario, from 1 to 7 November; the club's sports therapist Sarah Blanchette was also invited into the programme. Jonathan Ferland took the Drummondville bench in the interim, and lost a game to Rimouski in which the Voltigeurs led for 37 minutes before going down 3-2.

The rematch on 5 November went better. Drummondville beat the Océanic 5-2 at home, with Dylan Dumont and Hugo Dufour scoring in the first period, Antoine Robichaud taking first-star honours for his first two goals in the league, and Cooper Campbell adding his first as well. Tassé had three assists and Láryš was in goal. Ferland put the win down to the mood on the bench rather than the tactics. The result left the club 6-8-0-2 — still in the lower half of the Western Conference, with the schedule running to 64 games.

Outdoor games and the shape of the calendar

The club has been one of the drivers of the league's recent experiment with outdoor hockey. In December 2025 the Voltigeurs took part in the first Classique hivernale at the Trois-Rivières hippodrome, playing the Shawinigan Cataractes over the 4-6 December weekend, and won the event by beating Victoriaville 5-0 in the final.

It will not be back in the same place. On 31 March 2026 the co-director Steve Turcotte said the tournament had not drawn the crowds the organisers wanted and that an outdoor classic, while a remarkable project, was also an extremely demanding one; the four clubs involved — Shawinigan, Drummondville, Victoriaville and Sherbrooke — could not agree on continuing at Trois-Rivières. A new concept and venue were promised once the playoffs finished.

Otherwise the rhythm is the standard Quebec league one, and it is a long one: a 64-game regular season that in 2025-26 ran from a home opener against Chicoutimi on 19 September to a finale in Gatineau on 21 March, with a first trip to St. John's, Newfoundland, in late January and preseason work in Shawinigan and Nicolet in August.