The Wallaceburg Lakers Junior ‘C’ Hockey Club has once again been sold, this time to some Wallaceburg investors.
Jim McCrae, a former team president of the team, told the Sydenham Current that himself and five other people have bought the club.
“We more or less just turned it right back over to the community… where it should be,” he said.
The Byrne Laus Hockey Corp. were introduced as the new owners of the Lakers in April of last year, but things did not pan out. The team ended up finishing in last place in the Hobbs Division, finishing with a 3-36-1 record.
“It worked in Lakeshore and stuff, but they just couldn’t seem to get a hold of it here,” McCrae said of the Byrne Laus Hockey Corp.
“So we just went and offered to buy it back, and they took it.”
With the ownership in a share holder structure, McCrae said the new group of owners is donating some shares back to the community and the team will be run by a volunteer board of directors.
“I am very excited about it,” he said.
“I was quite surprised at the response I got when I went out and recruited a few people for this. I was quite surprised. They are all businessmen in town. A lot of them do not want to be mentioned. They just want to be silent partners, but they just said ‘yeah, it’s time to bring some pride to this town’. It has been lost over the years and they would like to get it back, just as much as anybody else. I think we have got the right attitudes going forward.”
McCrae said the team is also now out of debt.
“We are just going to be silent investors,” he said.
“We do have to be kept in touch with the meetings, but other than that they are free to run it how they did before. They have a clear sale right through and they should have a fairly easy operation to operate. It’s never going to be easy, but I think they will have a better chance at success.”
McCrae added: “We have been so far in debt for 10 years and last year it took us out of debt and it was a good move. We all agreed on that. We still agree on that. It’s just, the people weren’t from town and that kind of took the (impact) out of it. The investors that I talked to, that I got to help me out with, are all from Wallaceburg. There is nobody involved in this team now that is not from Wallaceburg.”
McCrae said Ritch Kanally, the general manager, and the recently hired new head coach Rick Vancoillie will both remain with the club, despite the change in ownership.
“The idea of Vancoillie was, we know he is not a logged in Junior ‘C’ coach, but what we are trying to do is get a coach in there that can actually communicate with the kids,” he said.
“It is something that is hard to do now a days because most coaches, they are from the old school and the kids aren’t, they are from the new school. We thought maybe it might be a little bit of an advancement to start
now and get it changed over.”
The club will be holding their annual general meeting on Tuesday, April 18, at 7 p.m. in the upstairs portion of the Royal Canadian Legion Br. 18 in Wallaceburg.
McCrae said anyone interested can attend, and anyone interested in being involved with the club, can run for a director position on the board.
“Last year that board was reduced to a booster club,” he said.
“All the constitutions and stuff were cancelled because it was sold. So this year what we are doing on the 18th is setting up the new club. So it’s going to have to have a new constitution and executive positions like president, vice president, treasurer, secretary will have to remain for the first two years, and then from that point on, it will be all publicly voted on, the same as any organization.”
Follow the Lakers on their website, here.
– Photo credit: Jocelyn McLaughlin
