WCBL 2020 season officially cancelled
The Western Canadian Baseball League announced on May 27 the official cancellation of the 2020 season. A league press release stated that the WCBL Board of Governors voted unanimously to cancel the season.
The Swift Current 57’s, led by Joe Carnahan, were one of 12 teams in the WCBL in 2019. The league was slated to have 10 teams this summer as the Yorkton Cardinals and Melville Millionaires were both granted oneyear leave of absences. An expansion team in Sylvan Lake, AB is expected to join the WCBL in 2021.
“For us in Swift Current we had kind of looked it as being pretty tough to have gone ahead anyway, just having lost our fundraisers in February and March,” said 57’s President Brad Woods. “Then with having billets, the majority of our team comes from the U.S., so as a franchise we had been preparing for it. But being part of the league and being part of the bigger group we wanted to make sure that all the options got exhausted before there was any final decision being made. It ended up the league made the call, but I think for a while we’d been feeling it was going to be pretty tough to have a season.”
The league cited the health and safety of the players, coaches, umpires, host families, staff, volunteers, and fans during the COVID-19 pandemic as the primary reason to cancel the season.
The league had considered pushing back the season to start on July 4 or using only Canadian players, but social distancing and financial issues simply meant that such options were not viable.
“It’s a really unique league in that we have the two conferences that are pretty different in how they are set up. So in Saskatchewan, most [teams] are community owned, volunteer driven, yearround kind of organizations where we need to fundraise, we need to get good support from major sponsorship. We need to try to sell tickets as well to make it go. Whereas the Alberta model, most of them are privately owned teams, I think with the exception of Brooks, so they are more business driven and their revenue is directly from games,” explained Woods.
“I think they felt that if they would have relaxed the social distancing [guidelines] and they could actually go ahead with the season, fill the stands, then financially they would be fine because they generate the majority of their revenue from ticket sales and game revenues. Whereas Saskatchewan teams rely on having a pretty solid pot before we start the season. It’s just different sized stadiums, different organizational models.”
“To our fans and communities, thank you very much for the continued support through these unprecedented times,” said the league release. “Our fans make WCBL stadiums a special place to play for the players during the summer, giving them a chance to play in front of thousands of people in Alberta and Saskatchewan. The community support the league and its teams have received over the past number of years is fantastic! As a league we have plans to implement a strategy to stay relevant and connected until we can get back on the field. With no baseball this summer teams will need community support now more than ever as they shift to survive this crisis,”
The 57’s are primarily composed of American players who spend the summer in Swift Current, which made it difficult to have a season during a global pandemic.
“It was always going to come down to being able to bring players in,” said Woods. “We would have had to have the kids in the country two weeks prior to that [start date] and then have them quarantine. So while their quarantined, where are they staying?”
Financially, the decision to cancel the season altogether was likely best for the 57’s.
“If we’d have brought all those kids in and then played two or three games and had an outbreak and had to shut down the season then we’d be in a lot tougher of a situation. Having had it called before any of that happened definitely made it more manageable.”
Woods said that the team would have the expenses of the apparel and equipment that was ordered for this summer but that stuff would carry over to next season.
“We did have some sponsorship with businesses that have stepped up with sponsorship already so my job now will be to contact all of them and see how they want to proceed, whether they want to carry over for next year or whether they want to be refunded. It’s my hope that they will carry it over, but we’re understanding of the times as well and some businesses might be cash strapped and they might need that money back,” he added.
The 57’s franchise still has plenty to do this summer even without baseball games.
“I think we need to have a pretty productive summer and fall on the organizational side,” said Woods, who noted that back in 2010 they had a public meeting to inform the public on the state of the ball club. “I think we’re once again at that point where our volunteer base, not the people that show up and help at games, but the people on the Board and the people that organize and help drive the program, they’re worn out. We need to inject some new life. We need to rejuvenate our Board. We need to look at our structure moving forward.”
They will also look to make up lost ground on the fundraising front.
“We need to make up those fundraising dollars that were lost not having the Field of Dreams Dinner, not having the Black Tie Hockey Draft, and not having some of the smaller events that we run. We’ll need to try and make up for some of that once the community is healed and everybody is back going again and looking for things to do.”
Woods also said the team hopes to have a garage sale to clear out inventory at some point.
“I don’t see us taking the summer off at all. I see us reorganizing and I see us recruiting. The ball team, the baseball operations side of it with Joe and his team, is always solid, but on a volunteer, board level, fundraising level, financially, we need to do some stuff to get healthy going into 2021,” he concluded.