Coates
The president of the Corner Brook Royals got together with other league officials at a weekend meeting of all entries in the West Coast Senior Hockey League.
Representatives of all teams shared concerns about the survival of the league with the cost of operating a team going up while fan attendance continues to spiral downward in all rinks around the league.
Making it even tougher to keep a team on the ice will be the repercussions of the 2016 provincial budget that will see fans of hockey having to make some tough choices about where they spend money in tough times.
“When you get less disposable income the part that suffers the most is your entertainment,” Coates said.
League officials have some tough decisions to make before team representatives present any proposals for next season to Hockey Newfoundland and Labrador at its annual general meeting in June. It will be at a meeting of HNL in September that most of the answers will be known, according to Ross.
For now, Coates said, everybody left the meetings with hopes of taking a hard look at their own organizations and seeing what can be done to get the league on solid footing for another season.
“You can’t keep increasing the cost because the fan base isn’t increasing,” he said.
Reducing the number of imports a team can sign is something that teams have been talking about for a year now, so there may be movement in that area, but Coates doesn’t think such a minor tweak will do much in the way of curbing expenses and figures some fans may walk away from the game if they can’t watch some of the quality players who have had import status in past years.
If there is another season, Coates also has other issues he has to deal with before putting a team on the ice. He had several members of his executive resign or retire since the Royals lost to the Cataracts in the league final and a lot of that has to do with the way they felt about the scary incident whereby Royals forward Ryan Salvis was seriously injured on a hit delivered by Rodi Short of the Cats.
How many more years can a team spend months after months at the completion of a season trying to clear off the debt from the previous season?
For Coates, there’s only so many years he’s willing to do it and it’s anybody’s guess on whether the time has come for him to cut his losses.
“It’s shaky, at best,” he said.
