Dear Bill,
Congratulations on your recent hiring as the next president of the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League. You have been chosen to lead the league through uncertain and challenging times because your combination of experience and vision for the league appealed most to the board of governors.
As you no doubt said in many interviews last week, the SJHL has a long and prestigious history. It has seen the likes of Rod Brind'Amour and Chris Chelios, Ron Hextall and Curtis Joseph, Brad Richards and Jaden Schwartz come and go. Its member clubs have won nine national championships since 1971.
The SJHL has produced excellence while keeping some of its teams afloat in very small markets.
Every league has issues to deal with at all times, and the SJ has weathered the recession relatively well. But fresh ideas are needed to keep all 12 clubs on stable footing for the foreseeable future, and you will be expected to provide them.
It starts with getting more bums in the seats. Attendance has been dropping league-wide over the past several years, and with more live sporting events on TV, the problem won't get any easier to deal with.
Average attendance totals last season in the league's three biggest centres - Yorkton, North Battleford and Estevan - were far from impressive. There's room for improvement virtually everywhere else, too.
And that's with many teams, if not all, fudging their numbers. Some team officials add random hundreds to the attendance total after the game, while others subtract a few dozens to reduce the cut they have to give to the league.
By the time the "official" number is reported, it's barely worth the paper it's faxed on.
Bill, that's something you should crack down on. You can't address the problem if you can't get a handle on how bad it is.
Let's also work on getting more scholarships, to better schools, for our players. With that one, you can kill two birds with one stone over time.
It was just announced that La Ronge star Doug Lindensmith is playing at Division 3 Norwich next season. Notre Dame's Travis Janke, a former SJHL scoring champion, is already there. Former Bruins standout Chad Filteau is with Sacred Heart of the Atlantic Hockey Association.
With all due respect to those institutions, players who star in the SJHL are by and large capable of playing at upper-echelon Division 1 schools. And there are countless more who graduate from the league each season without a U.S. scholarship.
A more effective scholarship strategy needs to be implemented and with your network of contacts gleaned through years of scouting, supporters of the SJ hope you're the man to do it.
It starts with putting a premium on education. Some teams are serious about their players' academic fortunes and hire reliable advisers. Those teams tend to be the ones with several scholarships every year.
Every effort must be made to attract more scouts to SJHL games, to give them all the information they need and set up post-game meetings with players.
When more players get their education paid for, it will be another carrot for potential recruits in what is becoming an intense fight for players amongst the four western leagues each summer.
Landing more of those highly sought rookies will gradually improve the product on display and, presumably, get more bums in the seats.
Finally, we understand that the Junior A Supplement is a two-year pilot project shared with four other leagues. But two items need to be tweaked at the first opportunity.
Suspending a player for their sixth fight in a 58-game season is outlandish.
The three-game ban levied to a player for a staged fight is longer than those imposed for some more serious infractions. Not only that, there were several cases last season when an intense, spur-of-the-moment scrap was wrongly considered staged.
By all means, curb the cheap shots. But when the time comes to re-open the Supplement, please don't forget the common sense that aided you on the police force.
