WHAT A RUSH
Professional sports returns to city
Men in shorts and sweaters ran up and down a green carpet Friday night, colliding and fighting over a small rubber ball, for paycheques.
That latter point is significant, given that Saskatoon hasn’t flirted with professional sport since 2003. A pro-sports black hole. That’s what we are.
But the Saskatchewan Rush shook things up Friday night at SaskTel Centre.
They introduced the sport of indoor lacrosse to a crowd announced at 9,147, and you know what? It worked.
Thousands of spectators who, a year ago, would never have entertained the notion of attending a lacrosse game of any kind, crashed the doors at SaskTel Centre, found their seats, and met the game.
Fans were visibly animated — many on the edge of their seats, living and dying with goals and scraps. Before the game, most of those in attendance couldn’t have told you the name of a single Rush player.
There’s a chance many of them still can’t — at least not yet — but they bought in.
The emphasis on this night was entertainment, which it must be for the unfamiliar sport to grab hold of this market.
It was strange to hear loud music playing non-stop while the action happened on the field, and that’s one of the few things I didn’t like from the evening. Personally, I’d rather listen to the clashing of sticks and to the holler of players fighting for position — and to hear fan reaction in greater clarity.
But that’s just me. Maybe I’m old, or something.
If you like music with your sports, it was there. If you like fights, they had ’em. If you like scoring, these guys were denting nets like nobody’s business.
It was rough, and it was fast; it came as billed, in other words.
Now having said all that, we must note that one lacrosse game does not a love affair make.
The franchise needs those fans who attended Friday night to not only come back, but to tell a friend, because this sort of thing needs a heaping helping of momentum. Saskatoon is, after all, a very small market by NLL standards.
The NLL is watching this experiment in Saskatoon very closely, and commissioner Nick Sakiewicz said earlier this week that the population issues might not actually matter.
“I’d rather fill up a house, and have a very relevant Saskatchewan Rush, than an irrelevant team in a big market,” he said Wednesday.
“The knee-jerk reaction from a lot of people is of course, we’d rather be in New York City. But I’d rather be in the place where the stadium’s full, the owner’s engaged with the community, the fans love the team, and adopt the team as their own.”
Saskatoon’s not there yet, of course, because this thing is brand new. They’re barely holding hands at this point.
But goodness gracious, Friday was a great start.
Back in 2002, the Saskatoon Blades and Sask-Place partnered to bring an NLL pre-season game between the Calgary Roughnecks and Vancouver Ravens to Saskatoon. But the league and players couldn’t agree on compensation for exhibition games, so they pulled out of Saskatoon — left the local guys holding the bag.
The Blades, and the arena, had to eat their marketing costs plus $2,300 on a non-refundable plane-ticket deposit.
Well over a decade later, the NLL actually did play a game in Saskatoon.
They showed up. They kept their promise.
We don’t know how this thing will play out in the long run, whether the Rush sink or swim, but on Friday night, they sure made a lot of friends.