Grande Prairie Storm playing the Spruce Grove Saints in game three of the 2018-19 AJHL playoffs. Photo Credit: Shane Clausing

By Shane Clausing

2020-21 Season

Storm VP provides outlook on 2020-21 AJHL season amid COVID-19

May 14, 2020 | 12:19 PM

With COVID-19 throwing a wrench into everyone’s future plans, Vice President of the Grande Prairie Storm Chris Millsap says right now there are no plans for the league to cancel the upcoming AJHL season.

“What it looks like is there is desire across the league to have a full schedule of games, but it may be delayed. There is two consequences to delay: Number one is a more condensed schedule and number two is the schedule finishes later.”

The biggest factor with making next season’s AJHL schedule has to do with the Centennial Cup (formerly known as the RBC Cup) which is scheduled to be held in Penticton next May. The AJHL playoffs normally finish near the end of the April.

“The end of the season can only be delayed by so long before it’s going to cause problems with what’s already booked at the end of the season. Right now, nobody is suggesting the season will be cancelled, but at the same time nobody is willing to put their stamp on a start date. It’s going to depend on when the government decides things can open up, and how our numbers and trends are as far as this virus go, but I think things are looking very good.”

Millsap added that the biggest problem that teams around the AJHL are facing is financial stability.

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AJHL teams are non-profit organizations and a majority of them count of events like fundraisers to help pay for team expenses. The Storm have already had to cancel two major fundraisers already.

“It would be crazy for us to go to our regular sponsors like oilfield companies and other companies in the area and ask for their sponsorship dollars right now when they have half of their workforce laid off. The situation we’re in right now is we need to know when the seasons going to start, and we need to know when we can go back to our supporters and our sponsors to start raising money again.”

“This team operates on about a 50/50 basis. Fifty percent of our revenue comes from sponsorship dollars and fifty percent of our revenue comes from ticket sales and if we don’t have those sponsorship dollars, we’re going to be hard pressed to operate and a lot of teams are in that situation. We hope that by the start of August we are back in position that we could start to fundraise for this hockey club.”

While there is no plan to cancel the current AJHL season, if the games can’t be played with fans, a season in 2020-21 seems unlikely.

“I don’t think it’s realistic for this league to operate without fans. If the decision as far as social distancing is that there’s a limit on fans or we can’t have fans in the building, there just won’t be junior hockey in Alberta.”

“We don’t have other sources of revenue. We don’t have television revenue, we don’t have any other endorsement deals or anything like that, that would allow us to fund the hockey club. We rely on our fans showing up, 50/50 ticket sales, limited merchandising, that sort of things.”

“If we can’t fill our building, having a season just won’t work. It doesn’t become any less expensive for busses, hotels, meals and equipment to operate the team. Our expenses would remain exactly the same, but our revenue would be gone.”

For teams looking for financial support, Ryan Rishaug from TSN reported last week that the league has looked into funding from the provincial government as they operate as non-profit organizations and some funding and grants could already be available.

However, Millsap tells EverythingGP that there used to be a program from the province that the AJHL would’ve been able to get money from, but the program was cut by the UCP government when they took office last year.

“We’re hopeful at a minimum that funding could be reinstated, but it’s a drop in the bucket. I don’t think we can expect any level of government to fully fund junior hockey in Alberta.”

“The budget for the Grande Prairie Storm is an excess $1 million, with 16 teams in this league, we can’t expect the provincial government to fund a $16 million season, where there really wouldn’t be any return to taxpayers. I hope we get some support financially from the provincial government, I know we got great support locally from our municipal government. To what level that would be, I can’t say.”