The largest recreation hockey tournament in Saskatchewan isn’t going to be happening for the second straight year.
The Estevan Strippers hockey club announced last week that it was forced to call off its annual Molson Spring Bust Tournament, which attracts 40 men’s and women’s teams to Estevan every April for five days of games.
“With all of the lockdown restrictions, we can’t even play over-30 hockey,” said Steve Godfrey, one of the organizers of the tournament. “Trying to plan a 40-team tournament on the possibility that we might be able to (have it), we just couldn’t.”
The Strippers had to cancel last year’s tournament after COVID-19 hit Saskatchewan just weeks before the tournament was set to start.
Multiple teams who haven’t been in the tournament before contacted the Strippers in the hope they might be able to participate this year.
“We had lots of interest and lots of support, but in the end, everyone understood why we couldn’t,” said Godfrey. “Everybody said they’re in for next year when we make that work.”
The final blow for this year’s competition came last Tuesday, when the provincial government announced that it was extending current restrictions to Feb. 19. Those measures prevent teams from playing games, and limit the number of people allowed in an arena to 30.
“If they would have started pulling back the restrictions, then we might be able to see a light at the end of the tunnel, where the second week of April, we could possibly run the tournament,” said Godfrey.
Since they have so many teams coming from out of town, Godfrey said they wanted to give the players lots of advanced notice about a cancellation.
“Everybody’s looking at their schedules and looking at their holidays, and we’d had enough requests and things for everybody wanting to arrange hotels that we didn’t want to leave a decision to the last minute,” said Godfrey.
More than 20 of the 40 teams come from outside of Estevan for the tournament each year, which means lots of people are staying at hotels and eating at restaurants.
Tournament organizers also have to make arrangements with referees and the suppliers of food and refreshments.
If the tournament did proceed, Godfrey said he doubts the Strippers could have had the cabarets and socials, which raise thousands of dollars for community projects each year.
He is still hopeful the Strippers and other teams can be back on the ice this season, but he doubts it will happen.
