So folks I’m back.
After about a year away from the local sports beat a roster shuffle here at Yorkton This Week has me back in the traces covering some of the local sports scene again, including the Yorkton Terriers.
The Terriers and the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League and I have grown pretty familiar over the years, having followed the team to Royal Bank Cup tournaments in Melfort, Brampton, ON, and the year they hosted, and being in Vernon, BC, in 2014, when the team won its first and, only national crown.
It will be good to get back to the Farrell Agencies Arena to cover the team. Over the last couple of decades I’ve covered a lot of games, seeing the team at its best and it worst, which is the ebb and flow of Junior hockey.
Through all those years I have not taken on a sports column in this publication, although writing such a column was how I got my start in Tisdale about 30 years ago now. So, it seems like a good thing to undertake again.
This space will come to have a mix of material in the weeks ahead. There will be some weeks I look inward at sports in our community, but knowing sports fans we tend to all have pro teams we live and die with, so I’ll be talking about them too.
And, that brings me to the recent Grey Cup. That Toronto won in dramatic fashion 27-24 is old news, but there was another story swirling around the Canadian Football League as its playoff games were being played that grabbed my attention more than the action on the field – more than even our Roughriders losing in the eastern final.
That storyline was the renewed talk about the CFL finally expanding to the Maritimes.
I have been a diehard CFL fan for years. It is the only football I watch. Yes I know there is some league down in the United States many drool over, but there is no city I relate too. It’s not my country. It’s not my league.
The CFL feels like part of the sport culture of this country and I take pride in being a fan.
So I have always thought a 10th team was something that was needed. It would balance things. Yes I know that would have meant Saskatchewan missing the playoffs this year, but I am OK with that for the betterment of the league.
There are few locales where a 10th team would make sense, Quebec City and a spot in the Maritimes about it, with the far eastern option making it a truly national league.
Maritime expansion is not a new idea. It has been talked about on and off dating back probably 50-years, and while we can be hopeful it is being kicked around again, I wouldn’t bet my George Reed autograph on it happening.
The hurdle is a stadium.
Some feel that if you build one the team will come and fans will follow.
Others aren’t sure a fan base can be created.
I’d guess fans are there to be made as it would be a pro sport in a region where none now exist, and it is only nine games a season.
But a stadium needs dollars to build, lots of dollars, and who signs the cheques is a big question mark.
Still, the kernel of an idea remains, and right now some people are trying to coax that kernel to grow. As a CFL fan I hope they are successful this time around and that we see a 10th team very soon.
