Dave Andrews

Alexandre Giroux of the Hershey Bears receives the league MVP award from AHL President-CEO Dave Andrews at Giant Center.

(JOE HERMITT, The Patriot-News 2009)

A goal laid out in the 2010 collective-bargaining agreement between the AHL and Professional Hockey Players' Association is reaching fruition in 2014-15.

The league announced Thursday that it is implementing an education and drug testing program this season.

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Really, in the last CBA we agreed that we wanted to proceed with it," Andrews said Friday. "The challenge was how to proceed with it and how to sync in with the National Hockey League program. That's taken some time.

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Obviously, one of the things that occurred in the National Hockey League's most recent collective-bargaining agreement was that the NHLPA and the NHL agreed to extend their program to the American Hockey League. Once that decision was made, it gave us essentially access to the testing program."

The agreement is the result of a collaborative effort between the AHL, NHL, NHLPA and PHPA, which represents AHL players in collective bargaining, that has been ongoing for the past year or so, Andrews said.

The AHL program will substantially replicate the NHL program

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It's something that our players have encouraged us to pursue over the last two or three years since the last collective-bargaining agreement," Andrews said. "Obviously, we were very much on side with that.

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The NHL is essentially providing this program to us. Without that, I don't know that we could afford to have the quality of testing program that the NHL has. It essentially is moving down to our level. I wouldn't say it's something I would take a whole lot of credit for. I think it's something that's been a while in coming for us, but I'm glad that we're there."

The NHL tests for performance-enhancing substances. Other forms of substance abuse are handled through the NHL/NHLPA Program for Substance Abuse/Behavioral Health.

A first positive NHL test results in a 20-game suspension without pay and mandatory referral to the substance abuse and behavioral health program. A second positive test results in a 60-game suspension without pay, and a third positive test results in permanent suspension with the eligibility to apply for reinstatement in two years.

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There's a certain number of team tests each year and a certain number of individual tests," Andrews said. "All of them are random and all of them are unannounced."

Said Bears President-GM Doug Yingst: "Random selection. We don't know who and we don't know how many times, which is a good thing.

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It's a positive move by both leagues. I think our player representatives and union are very positive about it and accepted it whole-heartedly. We look forward to putting it into operation this year."

The AHL drug testing program will be administered by the doctors who supervise the NHL/NHLPA Performance-Enhancing Substances Program and the Substance Abuse/Behavioral Health Program.

Andrews said the NHL mainly will foot the bill for testing.

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There's some cost to our league, as well," he said, "but basically the NHL program is just being extended to us."

Andrews stressed the importance of the education part of the program. The NHL will run seminars for AHL players.

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It's really about player safety and player health," Andrews said. "Every player in our league will be educated either at their NHL training camp or their own training camps or shortly thereafter by the NHL's medical group.

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You can't have a performance or a substance program without educating the players. In fact, the education part of it is perhaps the more valuable part of the program because it gives the players an understanding of what sort of substances are prohibited, but also what sort of supplements and substances that they might take that are really dangerous for them from a health perspective. Some of those are not necessarily performance-enhancing supplements, but the kind of supplements all sorts of people take – they think for their health – that are not particularly good for them."

Hershey Bears head coach Troy Mann.

Bears head coach Troy Mann said he and trainer Dan "Beaker" Stuck also plan to be frontline educators.

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I think it's good for the league, it's good for the players," Mann said. "We want everybody to be on the same page in terms of being clean, so to speak. I know we're going to do the right things here to make sure all our guys are taking the right stuff and doing the right things to be healthy and ready to go.

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We'll meet with the group and address it and even maybe bring in a particular individual to talk to our team in general in terms of the things that are going in their body and the proper way to go about it."

Vetting over-the-counter products to make sure players aren't unwittingly taking a performance-enhancing drug through a tainted supplement will be part of the education and monitoring process, Mann said.

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Usually guys are pretty good at doing their protein shakes and their recovery drinks," Mann said. "I've never seen any problems with it. In this day and age, everybody is kind of being extra cautious in making sure everybody is doing the right things."

NOTEBOOK

The AHL and PHPA exercised an option to extend the current CBA, which began in 2010, through the 2014-15 season. Yingst said he expects the new education and drug testing program to be a formal part of a new CBA that would begin in 2015-16.

The Bears and Rochester Americans, the two oldest teams in the AHL, wanted to play each other in 2014-15 . But that won't be happening. "First of all, we prefer to play all teams," Yingst said. "Knowing that that's an impossibility due to travel, then you try to identify a few teams in the Western Conference, Rochester being one because, historically, I think we've played them every year but one. They wanted to play us; we wanted to play them. It just didn't work out with the schedule-makers."