The final week of the Canadian Football League pre-season kicks off Thursday night and while it may be the last time for some players to make an impression it will be the first time for Hamilton to play in its temporary stadium.
Following all that happened in what seemed like the never-ending story of where the Ticats would play in 2013 while Ivor Wynne was being rebuilt for an official unveiling in 2014, Alumni Stadium on the campus of University of Guelph was chosen as the home away from home.
McMaster University would have been the logical place for the team to play for one year were it not for the fact the school’s administrators had concerns and a deal couldn’t be cut. That is all ancient history now.
Thursday’s game against the visiting Winnipeg Blue Bombers will be a rehearsal of sorts for whatever quirks and kinks arise from cramming a CFL game played in a university stadium, which normally has a seating capacity of 4,000 in the grandstand and an added 3,500 for the grass embankment. Temporary seats have been added, pushing the capacity to more than 13,000.
The stadium underwent some renovations in 2011 with a running track outside of the field, while the playing surface was refitted with synthetic turf. Based on an intrasquad game 10 days ago, the field received a strong endorsement from the players. The Ticats have invested $2 million in the stadium.
Perhaps the big question is whether Hamiltonians will embrace the Guelph experience and whether there will be a reciprocal feeling from Guelph toward the Ticats? On the Ticats website on Wednesday, team president Scott Mitchell tweeted that 1,500 tickets remain available for the team’s home opener July 7 against Edmonton. The availability of tickets for Ticats games has rarely been an issue, aside from the annual Labour Day game against Toronto, notwithstanding the fact that tradition will be aborted for at least one year. If the Ticats can’t sell out a stadium with only 13,000 or so tickets, that’s not a good sign, but there is still time for the Ticats to beat the drum about a new season.
Thursday’s game is available on cable TV in and around the Hamilton area, so perhaps the attendance won’t be an accurate gauge or barometer of the appetite of seeing the Ticats’ first game in their temporary digs. Pre-season games as a whole are used more to assess the players for the final time before the regular season. In this case, it’s also about assessing the game experience.
There have already been warnings sent out by the university that there will be parking issues, although it was noted Thursday’s game will be the only one played on a regular workday. Slotting the games on the weekend makes a lot of sense.
Coincidentally, the Ticats’ southern Ontario rivals, the Toronto Argonauts, will close out their pre-season at Varsity Stadium, a place that had once been their home before the team moved to another location and subsequently moved again. It has been 55 years since a CFL game was played at Varsity, so nostalgia will be the theme. The Argos won the Grey Cup last year, so right now there is pride and playing in a throwback stadium will seem special.
The Ticats last won the Grey Cup in 1999 and haven’t played in the game since. More often than not in the interval, the Ticats have failed to make it into the playoffs despite annual promises that each year will be different from the last.
This year, the Ticats have a new head coach, Kent Austin, who won the Grey Cup in that role in 2007 with Saskatchewan. He is part of the new belief in 2013 that this year will be the year the Ticats raise their level of play all the way to the Cup.
It would be interesting if it happened this year playing in a stadium that will be about half the size of the old Ivor Wynne and whatever the new unnamed stadium is. Losing has not made the Ticats an attractive proposition, which is why winning will mean so much this year. In a compact stadium that is minus the amenities of the old stadium, which itself lagged far behind the times in terms of comfort, the experience can be greatly enhanced by a winning product.
Guelph was never the first choice of the fans, who didn’t have a say in where the team would play during its one-year hiatus away from Hamilton. But the fans will clearly voice their opinion by whether or not they choose to make the short drive to Guelph to cheer on the team. The crowd can always make a difference in helping the home team, even though in this case the gathering will be somewhat of a hybrid of people from Hamilton and Guelph.
Alumni Stadium will be but a memory of a place the team played, a footnote in history if you will, but Thursday night will be a new experience and perhaps a harbinger of great things to come in the future.
There really is no place like home, even if it’s temporary.