YORKTON - The Yorkton Junior Terriers are back in the red and struggling to pay their bills.
The situation when announced recently is of course disturbing for a couple of reasons.
To start as Terrier team president Corvyn Neufeld suggested in a recent Yorkton This Week interview, it is difficult to imagine Yorkton without its junior hockey franchise.
The Terriers, as member of the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League have been responsible for a lot to cheer about as a community through the years.
The problem though there has repeatedly been too few fans in the stand leaving the franchise losing money and ending up in the ‘red’.
Most recently the Terriers were losing money pre-COVID.
While it might be easy to blame a worsening of the situation on the shut down over the pandemic, it was also government grants related to the COVID shutdown that put the team finances back in a positive situation.
However, the pre-pandemic decline in fans didn’t bounce back post COVID, and the team was again in trouble to the point “there’s a legitimate risk we might not finish the season if things don’t turn around,” said Neufeld.
With only two months left in the regular season, and the Terriers at present not seeming destined for a playoff run to bolster coffers it’s not a good situation.
So team is launching a sweet deal on season tickets for 2024-25 as a way to get some cash flow.
That does cause concern about next season money, but you need to survive now in order to even have to think about next season.
Now some will think this is a bit of a cry wolf situation, noting in the past finances have gone bad, but the team has always found a way out – but that thinking also needs to remember the Western Major League Yorkton Cardinals and Melville Millionaires both failed when they went too far into the red to operate.
Money is tight, as anyone buying groceries can attest, and city property taxes are going up as detailed at the regular meeting of Yorkton Council Monday.
You can only stretch a budget so far and entertainment is usually the first line to get trimmed when the purse strings need tightened.
Still, this is a situation where the community will decide the fate of the Terriers. It either rallies to the cause to help finance the team back into the black, or in the future we may wonder how in a hockey city the junior team vanished.
