Vegreville Rangers Take One Year Leave of Absence

Vegreville Rangers Take One Year Leave of Absence

Michelle Pinon News Advertiser

The Vegreville Rangers Hockey Club has officially announced that it will be taking a one year leave of absence from the North East Jr. B. Hockey League.

The decision to take a one year hiatus for the 2020-’21 season was a difficult one, stated Laine Stefan, Vice-President of the Vegreville Jr. B Rangers Hockey Club, in a letter dated Oct. 5, and addressed to council, fans and the community at large.

In a letter stated, “This was a very difficult decision, but due to Covid-19 pandemic and all the restrictions that come with this pandemic it is not financially or operationally viable for us to operate this season.”

Councillor Tina Warawa responded by saying, “I am sure it was a really difficult decision for them. I fee for that organization having an affiliation with hockey myself because they are in a very difficult spot where they have to look at sales of tickets versus what we face with minor hockey where we are not in that situation.

Hopefully we see that it’s a one year leave of absence because I think the Rangers bring a good thing to our community and there’s a lot of people who look forward to going to their games. Obviously, I wish them the best to regroup again for the next year.”

Mayor Tim MacPhee stated, “It’s an organization that has been in this town for a long time. It’s been a lot of joy and its helped a lot of young people in their careers over the years, and not just becoming hockey players, but becoming better people, team players. I know I coached there for a few years and really enjoyed my time there, and I hope they can get the program up and running next year.”

Rangers Club President Joe Budinski said they struggled with the decision and held off thinking things would change. “But here was still so much uncertainty with Hockey Alberta and the league itself.”

He explained there were several important factors they had to take into consideration as the league gave teams until October 11 to make a decision.

“There would be cohorts. They weren’t sure how play was going to be and what the schedule would be. What they were proposing is you play one team three times a week, twice on the weekend, and either Tuesday or Wednesday, and then you would have to take two weeks’ time off before you played again. That just doesn’t work for us. We’ve got a lot of kids in school and a lot who do shift work. We don’t know what the facility is going to look like, couldn’t use showers, could only allow 100 people in the rink, 25 per team. We started looking at the numbers and the difficulty we have filling our roster and Hockey Alberta not allowing affiliates.

We’re financially sound right now and we did not want to waste that money. We don’t have a mechanism for fundraising this year, and our Halloween dance is one of our big fundraisers, and that we are not able to get a facility for with social distancing and that’s not going to work. Our casino was supposed to be Sept. 1 and it got pushed back. Before we made the decision we had no idea when it was going to be.

As far as board advertising in the rink we had a hard time last year, it’s starting to get hard collecting money from sponsors. It’s just a sign of the times. So we said you know what, let’s take a step back and let this all play out. There’s no guarantee they’re going to start the season anyway. They say they’re going to start, but they themselves don’t know if they are going to start.

We tried hard to put it all together but it came to the point where you’re throwing good money after bad. It didn’t make sense. We just thought it was the best case to hang onto our money, we’ll still do some charitable stuff in town, and we’ll reload and retool for next year. Hopefully, by then this, (COVID-19) will all be gone away and there’ll be a vaccine, and hopefully, we can have full use of our facilities, and hopefully bus travel is easy. It just did not add up monetarily to go ahead with the season.”