When a sports team leaves town it’s rarely an amiable parting. More like a bitter divorce.
The parting usually comes after months and months of negotiations that begin with the best of intentions by both parties but slowly deteriorate into animosity and stubbornness, much like what happened to the Baltimore Colts of the NFL in the early 1980s.
Colts owner Robert Irsay and the city talked for months trying to find agreement to keep the team in Baltimore. The negotiations were slow and contentious, and rapidly deteriorated so Irsay began looking elsewhere. Irsay dispatched moving trucks to the team’s facility at 2 a.m. on March 29, 1984. All the team’s belongings were loaded up and by 10 a.m. the team had relocated to Indianapolis.
The St. Albert Steel’s departure to Whitecourt won’t be that quick or dramatic, of course, but just as the Colts left a sour taste in Baltimore that lasted for years, so too will there be a stink around St. Albert.
Both sides – with Mayor Nolan Crouse and team owner Greg Parks at the helm – are to blame for the city losing its second Alberta Junior Hockey League team in 10 years. It seems there were few negotiations between the sides since last summer when the mayor announced the city’s final position and basically gave Parks a take-it-or-leave ultimatum. Parks chose the latter.
That’s not surprising, given that the product he put on the ice was terrible. Attendance this season averaged 247 fans. The season-ticket base had fallen from 454 in their first season to about 75, and the team had done little to embrace the community.
There are plenty of ways the team could have improved its position financially, starting with a basic effort to sell itself. But it seems the Steel were about as aggressive in their marketing efforts as they were in trying to win hockey games.
Which makes one wonder, why did Parks bring the team to St. Albert to begin with if he wasn’t prepared to make more of an effort to make it work? It’s not to suggest he came here with an ulterior motive that didn’t include a long-term stay, but he had five years to market the team to the citizens and failed miserably.
As did the city. And not just council, but St. Albert. In a town that has rinks named after Mark Messier and Troy Murray, that used to be known as having a “win at all costs” mentality when it came to sport, that is overflowing with moms and dads convinced their five-year-old is destined for the NHL, where was the community in the last year?
Is there really so little interest in hockey beyond the minor level that no one could put together a group with the finances and interest in keeping junior hockey in town? That certainly appears to be the situation. Which leaves St. Albert with an empty rink and a growing reputation as a community that doesn’t care about junior hockey.
