The Tumbler Ridge Steel Kings have a new part-owner.
Andre Payette has been involved in professional hockey for the last 25 years, including eight years in the AHL. During his time there, he won a Calder Cup Championship. He also spent several seasons in Great Britain as a player, coach and manager.
Payette hit the ground running. “I’m going to be here trying to get things moving: looking for sponsorship, looking for volunteers looking for billets…you know, just trying to get the season rolling because it’s coming fast,” he says.
Payette is a part owner of the Tumbler Ridge team, as well as the Mackenzie team, and will be spending time in both communities, trying to drum up corporate sponsors “I’ve met some great people this week,” he says. “Southpaw have decided to come on board with us, as has Darryl with the local Freshmart. 242-BREW has come on board, which is a great start. We’ve had some really good meetings with Conuma, too, and hopefully they can become a part of it.”
He says he’s also been talking with Golden Arrow to come on board as a bus provider. “We’ve started to talk to a lot of local businesses about becoming involved in the team.”
The next step, he says, will be to hire a coach/GM. “That’s another thing that will be decided in the next couple of weeks. We’ll be putting our staff in place here so that the team runs properly.”
He says that players will be coming in from around the world to pursue their hockey careers in Tumbler Ridge. “Most of our graduating players receive scholarship and/or professional opportunities after leaving our Junior A program.”
While the timelines are tight, Payette says he’s done this before, so he’s pretty sure everything will be ready for the start of the season in September. The new team will play 42 games over the season: 21 at home, 21 away.
He says it’s important to be transparent with the community about what it takes to run the team. “It costs a lot to run a team,” he says. “And we are looking for community support. That means volunteers and billets and a community board. And after that, we need to get the townspeople excited. We need to start selling season tickets and promoting the team.”
Payette says he’s excited for the season. “We’re gonna put a good product on the ice,” he says. “You’re gonna have something exciting to do throughout the winter months. And the arena is going to be hopping on a Friday, Saturday night when you’re playing against Mackenzie. It’s going to be great.”
While things are still up in the air, the first league game is tentatively scheduled for September 30, with the possibility of a few pre-season games beforehand. “There will be a playoff season, and if we win the playoffs, BC will play against Alberta and then the ultimate goal would be to go to the national championship in Toronto.”
The current plan is for the BC teams to face off against other BC teams, but that’s not in stone. Derek Prou, Executive Director for GMHL West says they have a lot of autonomy. “We can do what makes sense here,” he says. “We’re not forced to play a certain schedule, and it might work out that we could do a couple of BC/Alberta games, especially here in Tumbler. I mean, you’re not very far from, you know, from High Prairie or Fox Creek, though that might have a domino effect on everything else. We really have to get creative with scheduling.”
He says the plan is to stick with Friday and Saturday night games, and as soon as you start doing extended travel and inter-provincial play, it becomes harder to stick to that. But with plans to add in more new teams over the next few years, that might change. “We could have added a lot of teams this year, but three is kind of our max that we’re willing to do to make sure that we can manage it properly,” he says. “But I think in this BC corridor, from Tumbler through to the West Coast, there are a lot of really good opportunities. And over time, you might see these pockets of teams, say Dawson or Chetwynd. And in the West, add in Smithers or Terrace or Prince Rupert. Now all of a sudden you can maybe do a Friday, Saturday, Sunday tour. But I don’t really know where we will max out. We’re not going to keep growing three teams a year forever. But if I had to guess, next year will be our last aggressive growth year and then after that, we’ll add one or two teams here and there. But we’re so far from saturation. You know, in Ontario, you’ve got five leagues all vying for the same players. Here, we’re far from saturation. There’s a lot of players in the West who still don’t have places to play.”
Over the last few weeks, the team has also gotten a new logo and a steel-coloured uniform in preparation for the new season.
Season tickets have gone on sale (at https://www.tumblerridgejuniora.com/news/season-ticket-drive). The first 150 sold will be at $350; after that, tickets go up to $500.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
