The QMJHL Entry Draft: Big Spectacle, Big Potential
SAINT JOHN– Saint John will be on display to the CHL next week as it plays host to the QMJHL Entry Draft on June 3.
Though the free draft event itself takes place just one day, Saint John Sea Dogs president Trevor Georgie says it’s actually a much bigger operation.
“Saturday is the spectacle, but all week long starting on that Tuesday [May 30], we have the hockey world congregating in Saint John,” he says. “Owners, governors, general managers, team presidents, coaches, all league officials, all will be in Saint John for league meetings.”
The actual draft is a highly technical large-scale event and will be on par with the other drafts hosted in hockey.
“It’s a spectacle. It is produced just like the NHL draft. The same pageantry, the same excitement, the trades,” says Georgie. “All that the NHL draft provides, the entry draft is the same thing. It’s the introduction to these young players to the league.”
The QMJHL entry draft is expected to bring $1.3 million into the local economy, which includes money that will be spent at local bars, restaurants, shops and hotels. Georgie says almost 1000 hotel rooms are already booked by the league for the event, but that doesn’t include the rooms that will be booked by agents and player families.
Victoria Clarke, executive director of Discover Saint John, says hosting the draft is an opportunity to showcase the city.
“For us, sports tourism is this huge opportunity for the city. There’s a huge capacity to host things here in the city and for us, it’s a part of our sales cycle,” she says. “We actually have somebody that’s dedicated to attracting sports tourism business here to the city.”
This will be the first time Saint John has hosted a draft, but it won’t be its first major CHL event. In 2008, the city hosted the Canada-Russia Challenge and in 2010, it hosted the Subway Super Series. Clarke says the draft will be an opportunity to show the CHL and other sports leagues that Saint John is capable of hosting large-scale sporting events.
“It’s going to give us the ability to show our capacity to execute a really technically complex event because this is a draft … because there are so many technical components to this,” Clarke says. “There will be many moving pieces from a technology point of view. It gives the QMJHL a taste of what we could deliver on a future bid on some CHL events.”
For Georgie, hosting this draft is ultimately an investment in the community. The event costs about six figures to put on and he says the team won’t be making money from it. That being said, hosting the draft does help put the team in a good position to place a bid to host the Memorial Cup in the future.
“Everything we do as an organization that we’ve done in this past year in terms of winning on and off the ice and being a model franchise in the CHL, everything we do daily is with the idea in mind that one day we would like to host the Memorial Cup,” he says. “So the draft is just another piece of success for the Sea Dogs and a part of our narrative when we truly look to put up an appeal to the Memorial Cup.”
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