THUNDER BAY -- Club president Rory Cava says it’s time for the Lakehead Thunderwolves hockey team to hit the refresh button.
A summer after missing the OUA playoffs for the first time in 15 seasons, the team is reaching out to the community with an online survey aimed at making improvements off the ice.
The team on Tuesday also unveiled a revamped dressing room to boost morale and attract potential players and Cava said the team will also be reaching out to current and former players to see what changes they can suggest to help improve the recruitment process.
LU_Thunderwolves_DressingRoom from Dan Garrity Media on Vimeo.
“I think we want to engage our fans, our corporate supporters and the entire community with what they think about Thunderwolves hockey,” Cava said.
“I know everybody wants us to win hockey games and that’s the first thing we look at, how we’re doing on the ice. That’s the big focus with us. But I think it’s the whole experience, the game experience, how our players handle themselves in the community and basically what people think of us.”
The team’s poor performance – it finished 8-16-4 last year, ninth in the OUA West – is most certainly having an impact at the turnstiles.
The Wolves during the mid 2000s routinely drew more than 3,000 fans a night, selling out the building on occasion.
But they attracted fewer than 2,000 for the regular-season finale last season and the announced crowds were often far greater than the number of fans who actually bothered to come out to Fort William Gardens to watch the games.
Cava said there’s no question the attendance woes are part of the reason they’re going in this direction, a little more than a week before the team is slated for hit the ice for non-conference play.
“We had a bit of tough start last year. We lost our games at the beginning and I don’t blame some of the people for being upset,” he said. “But we’ve addressed that. I think we’ve had a great recruiting year. Time will tell how it goes. But there’s more than just how we play on the ice.”
Veteran defenceman Justin Sefton said the new dressing room and new attitude is a chance to erase the bitter memories of 2015-16.
“It’s easy to say it’s about time they had a change in here,” Sefton said.
“It’s been so many years. But it worked out perfectly that after a season like last year to have something like this change and have a whole new changeover in guys.”
The survey can be found at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RPZKGM9.
