ROB MURRAY: Canmore Eagles Head Coach/GM  Andrew Milne – welcome back to the show. The regular season begins tonight at home against Drumheller. The Eagles had their opportunity to face another team for the first time since March last weekend with some preseason action against the Calgary Canucks. What was that like for the guys to get back on the ice?

ANDREW MILNE: It was really exciting. I think they were excited to get on the ice for some game play and get some familiarization into what they’re comfortable with. It was what I would call some sloppy hockey for a while as we got back into it, but the contact was there, the compete was there. For our guys the games were great measuring sticks and the opportunity for us to get to where we need to get to in order to play the regular season starting tonight.

RM: A number of returning veterans. Who are you going to be leaning on from that roster to really make an impact this season?

AM: You’re right, we have a lot of returning guys. I like our back end, the way we have Drae Gardiner, Dylan Witzke, Cam Chin, Cunningham, and Lyons, all guys that played for us last year and are familiar. We’re going to look to the back end to be pretty strong this year. The guys up front – we have Lane Paddison who only played 30-some games last year because of injury, he had great exhibition games and played real well. Ethan Shaeffer’s back and looks great. Michael Spafford and Zach Carlson…all guys that are eager to show what they’ve done in the off season. Their goal is still pursuing some Division 1 Scholarships and they’re excited and hungry and ready to do that.

RM: What about some new faces who you think might make an impact this year?

AM: We have a group of young guys who’ve come in. You look at Andreai Proctor-Ramirez is a goalie that put up great numbers out of the Midget AAA program. He unfortunately had an injury sustained early in the development season and hasn’t had much game time, but he’s going to be a guy that we’re going to watch and be excited with. We have Riley Dekowny out of Swift Current, Saskatchewan, who’s been a nice surprise, and Isaac Suppin has had great success out of his group last year in Kelowna and put up great numbers. We have a well-balanced lineup, I think a pretty deep lineup. Obviously we have to replace some goals from both Alex and Connor and we’re going to have to that by committee. We’re not going to have one or two guys that can score 35 goals. We’re going to get everybody to contribute offensively.

RM: For the fan experience – how is it going to work this year? Obviously with COVID and capacity limits things are going to look a little different at the Rec Centre, aren’t they?

AM: We were fortunate that we made it through the announcement yesterday of hockey being shut down, and that’s only at the minor level. We have strict rules in place that the Alberta government has worked with the AJHL on to make sure that we have social distancing. Seats are distanced throughout the facility. We have a hundred max capacity. Masks are mandatory within the Canmore Rec Centre. We encourage lots of hand washing and basically just taking care of making sure that we’re on top of the COVID-19 protocols. The players are all wearing masks as they transfer to and from the facility. We’re going to try and make it as enjoyable a fan experience as possible. The unfortunate part is there’s limited tickets. We’re going to probably have general public tickets go on sale day before every game at 9:00 AM. The majority of our games are going to be played on the weekend. The day before, at 9:00 AM, we’ll put tickets on sale and what’s left over will hopefully be scooped up by the general public.

RM: Can you make that work from an organizational standpoint? I mean one-fifth the capacity in the arena means one-fifth the ticket sales, essentially.

AM: Yeah, it’s not great. Obviously the business model is not good. If we’re going to have hockey being played the players are going to have to subsidize that a little bit. The pay-to-play model has been something the league’s been talking about for a number of years, and under the circumstances we were really left with no choice. The players are going to be paying a bit of a fee in order to make sure that we’re able to do this this year.

Tickets are sold out for tonight’s game, but it will be available to stream from HockeyTV.

Filed under: AJHL, Canmore, Canmore Eagles