Reading, PA – The Reading Royals of the ECHL, affiliate of the Philadelphia Flyers of the National Hockey League and Lehigh Valley Phantoms of the American Hockey League, today announced that the team has agreed to terms with forward Sean Wiles. He is the first player announced as signed by the Royals to an ECHL Standard Players Contract for the 2014-15 season. Consistent with team policy, terms of the SPC were not released.
Video of Head Coach Larry Courville’s discussion regarding the signing of Wiles is available at: http://youtu.be/i46xHjHyLhM.
Last year, in fifty-five regular season games with the Royals, Wiles (6’3/203) (27) recorded a career high forty-five points (19g-26a) and thirty-eight penalty minutes. His nineteen goals with Reading put him in a three-way tie for second most on the team. Five of those goals proved to be game winners, including one of three that he scored in a hattrick (and four-point) performance for the Royals in the team’s 6-2 win over the Wheeling Nailers on January 8, 2014. That game was not only Wiles’ fourth multi-point performance in a span of five games (and one of seven multi-point games in a span of eleven played), but also seemed to trigger an amazing run for the Royals during which the team won thirty-one of the final forty-four games of the regular season. That game also added an exclamation point to a week in which Wiles was named the Sher-Wood Hockey ECHL Player of the Week.
Wiles also had an eleven game stint in the AHL last year with the Bridgeport Sound Tigers, where he scored the team’s lone goal in a 3-1 loss to the Manchester Monarchs on December 15. He also had a short call up to the Hershey Bears of the AHL but did not appear in a game with the Bears. In the five post-season games played by the Royals in the Eastern Conference Quarterfinals against the Fort Wayne Komets, Wiles led the team in scoring with four points (3g-1a), bagging a point in four of five of those playoff games. He scored the team’s first goal in Game Two—the only win for the Royals in the post-season, and Wiles scored the only goal for the team in Reading’s losses in Games Three and Five. He led the team with twenty post-season shots on goal.
Wiles, who will be entering his fourth year of pro, has scored sixty-one goals and assisted on fifty-two others (113 points) in 194 total pro games. In 2012-13, he racked up twenty-six goals as a member of the Las Vegas Wranglers—fifteen of which came in a span of just twenty-two games for the Wranglers from late February through March of that year. In his rookie season, 2011-12, which he began with the Rapid City Rush of the Central Hockey League, he joined Las Vegas mid-year and was part of a club that won the Western Conference Championship before being defeated in the 2012 Kelly Cup Finals by the Florida Everblades.
Prior to turning pro, Wiles played four years of college hockey at the University of Alaska-Anchorage, where he was selected as the school’s Most Improved player after his junior season. Wiles, who was twice the second leading goal scorer for the Seawolves (junior and senior seasons), registered a total of forty-eight points (22g-26a) and seventy-nine penalty minutes in 111 college games.
Season Tickets for the 2014-15 Reading Royals ECHL season are currently available. Call 610-898-7825 for more information or log onto www.royalshockey.com.