Taylor Fraser is captain of the St. Albert Steel junior hockey team and although the Alberta Junior Hockey League season is only 17 games old, the youngster is facing a major challenge: how to keep his team positive and upbeat when every game is a real struggle to be competitive.
Fraser is 20 years old, in his final year of junior, and although this situation may help prepare him for the challenges of the real world, it certainly doesn’t make for a very enjoyable season.
Fraser admitted after the weekend that it’s a frustrating situation, one that he says will only get worse if the young players lose their desire and interest in coming to the rink for practice and games.
But then, what is there to be enjoying when the Steel can’t win a home game (they’re 0-5-2 at Performance Arena) and have won only two of their 17 games.
And now the real issue is staring Fraser, his teammates and team management right in the face: the fans are staying away. In their two weekend home games – both losses of course – a total of only 210 fans showed up. Attendance has been steadily declining since early last season and Greg Parks – co-owner, general manager and coach – seems unable to do anything to stop the skid on the ice or in the stands.
Season tickets dropped from 454 in 2010-11, the Steel’s first season in St. Albert, to just 117 last season. A Drive for Five campaign this summer to try to sell 500 season tickets was a failure.
Perhaps, as has been shown many, many times in the past by much better professional hockey people than him, Parks is simply wearing too many hats. It’s tough enough to coach 20-some teenagers (and the odd 20-year-old), most of whom are away from home for the first time. And in a small community, even though the Steel is supposedly the highest calibre of hockey being offered, a team cannot afford to lose its fan base.
So far, we haven’t seen much of an effort being made to entice St. Albert hockey fans to Steel games. There’s little evidence of much pre-game promotion, but maybe that’s due in part to the lack of attendance, which means a lack of funds to put towards promoting home games.
St. Albert is full of community-minded individuals and businesses. It seems odd that the Steel would have difficulty getting financial support from local businesses and seats-in-the-stands support from individuals, if the team made the proper efforts to entice that support.
One has to wonder what impact this summer’s dispute between Parks and the city had on the team. It certainly didn’t help when Mayor Nolan Crouse put his foot down and said the city wasn’t going to negotiate any further – they had made their final offer and it was basically take it or leave it.
Now the team and the city have four months to find a mutual understanding to keep the team in St. Albert. The team’s lease expires in August next year but a new agreement has to be finalized by Feb. 28. With the team’s poor performance on the ice and the painful lack of butts in the seats, there may not be a lot of reasons for the city to want to fight too hard to keep the team.
That would be a shame. Put the team on the open market and it will, in all likelihood, be gone. A businessman in Whitecourt has been trying to get an AJHL team for his community for a number of years and after losing out in an attempt to get a franchise there last year, he may be eager to jump at whatever offer Parks might make.
And that would leave St. Albert out in the cold. Be sure of one thing: lose a second franchise in less than eight years and the AJHL isn’t likely to come back.
