Mayor Dean Ball is proud of his Deer Lake Red Wings jersey, so he will keep it tucked away in a safe place for now with hopes the red and white will find its way back to senior hockey circles on the west coast.
Ball is a big supporter of the Red Wings, so he was disappointed when the team announced earlier this month that they wouldn’t be back for the 2018-19 West Coast Senior Hockey League because management felt there wasn’t enough player interest to get a team back on the ice for this winter.
Ball said he wasn’t overly surprised with the news, but he was certainly disappointed because he knows how important the team is to die-hard hockey fans in the town.
“We’re going to miss the Red Wings. The Red Wings have been an icon in our community for years,” Ball said Monday afternoon.
Ball said it’s unfortunate that the team couldn’t get enough players to commit for another season, but he also realizes it’s pointless to enter a league if management doesn’t feel like they have a group of players who can be competitive on a nightly basis.
“You have to be competitive in order to have a fanbase and you have to have a good supply of hockey players to pull from,” he said.
He appreciates the effort put into keeping senior hockey alive on the west coast and he knows management of the Red Wings did everything they could to put a team on the ice another year, so if they felt there weren’t enough players, they would know what would be best for all hands.
There will be some open ice-time slots with the demise of the Red Wings, but Ball said filling the empty slots won’t be an issue because there is a high demand for ice-time on the west coast, with minor hockey teams always searching for time slots, so he has no worries about lost revenue.
He would prefer to be wearing his Red Wings jersey on the weekends. He knows there are a lot of die-hard fans just like him who will miss spending the weekend watching the team in action, so he understands the disappointment being felt in the hockey community with Deer Lake missing from the picture.
“We’re hoping this won’t be the last you’ll see of the Deer Lake Red Wings,” he said. “From knowing the management group of the team, I knew this decision didn’t come lightly, so it’s certainly a sad day for us, but we will see what happens.”
