As a 47-year resident of St. Albert I am totally disgusted by The Gazette’s lack of coverage of the 43rd annual John Reid Memorial U15AAA (formerly bantam) hockey tournament held Jan 13-16.
This tournament brings 15 teams from all over western Canada and beyond to St. Albert every year in January along with hundreds of scouts, hockey executives, families, and friends. It is widely recognized, along with the Macs Midget tournament in Calgary, as one of the most prestigious events of its kind. It goes a long way to keeping St. Albert on the hockey map. Is there a bigger sports event of any kind in St. Albert? Let alone one that has been running for 43 years? I don’t think so.
In the past The Gazette has provided front-page coverage and extensive sports section space to this tournament. Yet this year, aside from a passing mention in a story regarding the John Reid scholarship on Dec. 28, there has been nothing. No lead up, no profiles, not even results.
This year the St. Albert team advanced all the way to the semi-finals for the first time in decades. What a great story. But not a word anywhere in The Gazette. How about a story about local Hockey Hall of Famer Jarome Iginla returning to St. Albert as coach of Rink Academy Kelowna after having played in the tournament 30 years ago?
Amateur sport is an important part of life in St. Albert and yet The Gazette has chosen to completely ignore one of its most important events. Inexcusable.
Bill Russell, St. Albert
Editor's note
We no longer have the staff or the page counts to support a separate sports section. As with many other businesses, we have suffered severe cutbacks during COVID, which at The Gazette forced the loss of half of the newsroom staff in the fall of 2020, and provides us with half the print space — we are currently only printing one paper a week instead of two. Sadly, this problem is industry wide. News organizations across the country are now faced with the unique problem of communities who want the same level of coverage from newsrooms that have been decimated by cutbacks in recent years. The Gazette's reporters will continue to write sports features and sports news stories as they come up. The paper no longer has the capacity to cover games and tournaments, or produce a regular separate section. We have created Community Connections, a section of our website some schools, parents, and teams have already begun to embrace to help fill those gaps with community-generated news. We hope this means all of the teams out there will be seen and celebrated in a new way.
