So you were involved in months of negotiations and everything was rolling along smoothly, and you had nary a hint of any qualms from your bargaining partner until one day they dropped a bombshell and your plans went up in smoke? And yet the only irony Mr. Mitchell detects is related to the business dealings of Bob Young's MRX and the Vanier Cup? Too rich.
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McMaster sacks Ticats’ 2013 games plan
June 8, 2012 04:06:00
In a move that has stunned the entire Hamilton football community, McMaster University has told the Tiger-Cats that they cannot play any part of their 2013 season at the university’s Ron Joyce Stadium.
For at least six months the CFL franchise and the university, which has come to be known for its own football team, have been discussing the Ticats using Ron Joyce Stadium for at least four games next July and August while the new Pan Am Games stadium is being constructed on the site of the franchise’s current home at Ivor Wynne Stadium.
The Ticats were planning to front-end their 2013 schedule with home games so that as many as five could be played on the Mac campus before Labour Day weekend when the bulk of students return for the school year.
But at 1 p.m. Thursday, Mac athletic director Jeff Giles, himself a former executive in the Canadian Football League, called the Ticats to say there would be no deal of any kind.
“We’d been meeting for six months and had got down to a lot of the finer details,” said a clearly miffed Scott Mitchell, the Ticats president. “And we’d had no negative feedback at all.”
“I guess we’re very disappointed in the way the news was delivered. It had all been positive and then to be given the final decision in a call, without any discussion beforehand,” Mitchell said. “And they had been planning to issue a press release right away.”
Having a good relationship with the CFL team is important to the university, said Andrea Farquhar, McMaster’s assistant vice-president for public and government relations.
But after consultation with stakeholders, including students, neighbours and Hamilton Health Sciences, the university decided that having Ron Joyce Stadium host Ticats games wasn’t feasible. Chief among the concerns raised, Farquhar said, was traffic congestion and the possibility that patient and ambulance access to the hospital could be impeded.
The impact on the more than 10,000 students attending summer classes and noise from game day activities in a residential area were also factors, Farquhar said. She noted to increase seating capacity to 15,000 from 5,500 would have involved temporary stands on three sides of Ron Joyce Stadium and the closure of Michell Crescent for three months.
The Ticats are renting several Mac facilities including residence rooms and the stadium for their training camp and have been doing so annually since Bob Young bought the team for the 2004 season. It’s estimated the Cats pay Mac about $200,000 during each training camp.
The Ticats had other possibilities for the 2013 games that will now be Mac-less, and it appears the University of Western Ontario will be the beneficiary. The Labour Day game is likely to be at Rogers Centre in Toronto but most of the other games could now go to Western, although Moncton has a greater chance.
Terese Quigley, the former athletics director at Mac, is now athletics director at Western. And the Western Mustangs’ head coach Greg Marshall also coached at Mac and was Young’s first coach with the Ticats. Both have strong relationships with the Tiger-Cats and each is a huge supporter of the team playing there.
“We’ll be fine,” Mitchell said. “I quite like what this will turn into next year. “We were under no illusion whatsoever that Mac had any obligation to host games. But we’ve been trying for the sake of our Hamilton-based fans to keep as many games as possible in Hamilton and Mac would be perfect for that. Our regional fans will be OK, but this will be hard on those who live in Hamilton and can’t get around as easily. We’ll try to keep the games as close to Hamilton as possible.”
That could include places such as Waterloo and Guelph, but bet on most of the games going to London, where the stadium is slightly removed from the main campus.
On Grey Cup weekend in Vancouver last November, the McMaster Marauders, behind quarterback Kyle Quinlan, upset Laval for their first Vanier Cup.
“I find it ironic that it was MRX (a holding company that plans the Vanier Cup and also owns the Ticats) paired the Vanier Cup and Grey Cup together and Mac seemed to be having a pretty great time at that,” Mitchell said.
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