HOCKEY TOURNAMENT CANCELLATION NOTICE:

Due to the lack of committed teams paying a portion of their entry fee by Friday’s deadline (as outlined in our tournament poster), the 2008 edition of the Annual Northern Cup Open Senior Contact Hockey Tournament scheduled for March 21-23 in La Ronge will be cancelled this year.

Our commitment was to guarantee the $20,000.00 cash prize payout, but in turn we required a guarantee from interested teams to make a commitment to us by paying half the entry fee up front, no exceptions.

We apologize for the teams who did call in advance and expressed their interest and we will make arrangements to pay back their entry fee.

I'm here at home on a Saturday morning catching up on whats happening in the hockey world. My preference would have been to be at the rink watching fast-skating, hard-hitting senior hockey. We have the rink, we have the money and we made a guarantee, we have the fan interest, hell we have one of the best highways in the province to travel on, but we didn't have enough teams even after offering out-of-province half the entry fee. For any tournament out there that guarantees $20,000.00 (or in that range), our entry fee of $800.00 was pretty cheap (we actually dropped the price $100.00 from last year), I've seen posters of tournaments with a $6,000.00 payout for the same amount of entry fee as ours. So after spending money for advertising and trophies, successfully seeking corporate sponsorship and donations over the past several months, spending countless hours posting information on websites and emailing people (including every senior hockey team in Saskatchewan that had an email or had players with emails), sending out faxes of the poster on a regular basis, making personal phone calls or talking to guys I know who run teams in the native tournament circuit, we had to cancel due to lack of teams. Although that totally blows my mind, it sure has been a learning experience for me thats for certain. At least I know now whose word is as good as gold, who makes a legitimate effort, who not to trust, who talks out of their as** (rectum), who not to believe. You know who you are, haha! Ikosi pitima!