WHL WHITEHORSE TIX SELL OUT IN TWO HOURS
Courtesy Whitehorse Star – An hour and 45 minutes is all it took on Saturday for Whitehorse hockey fans to gobble up the 1,000 tickets available for the Western Hockey League regular season game between the Vancouver Giants and Kamloops Blazers coming to Takhini Arena on Feb. 12 for Scotiabank Hockey Day in Canada.
Doors opened at Sport Yukon at 11 a.m.
Before 1 p.m., the tickets were sold out, said George Arcand, vice-chair of the local organizing committee (LOC) for Hockey Day in Canada.
“I wasn’t sure it’d go quite that good,” he said. “It’s gone smooth, it’s gone quickly and efficiently.”
The tickets were priced $30 a piece with a limit of two tickets per person.
At its longest, the line up stretched for more than a block.
Within the first hour, the line had dwindled to almost no one.
“Compared to yesterday (Friday), at 26 below, this is fantastic. It’s made it far easier than it would have been,” Arcand said. “I don’t think it would have changed the line up, but it would have been a little more unpleasant for everybody, so it’s a bonus.”
The capacity for Takhini Arena is 1,500 seats, leaving 500 tickets still up for grabs.
Arcand said the LOC will stretch the remaining tickets as far as they can go.
“Obviously the arena’s not big enough for the demand,” he said, adding that in early January there will be another ticket sale aimed at giving access to Yukoners outside the capital.
“We need to bring the tickets to them a little bit better, on a phone bank idea or something like that, so we’re trying to figure that out. That’s a work in progress at the moment, but our commitment is that we will be able to give the communities access as well as Whitehorse.”
The LOC is also looking into selling some of those tickets within Whitehorse, he added.
“We’ve made an effort to sell them to the people of Whitehorse so we need to make an effort to sell them to the outside communities too.”
On Saturday, fans on line and those who had recently purchased their tickets agreed on a few things.
Whitehorse had not been privy to this kind of high-caliber hockey. Exposing young hockey players to that caliber will be good for the sport in the Yukon. Waiting in line for tickets wasn’t as painful as they thought it would be.
First-year Bantam Mustang Alex Hanson had been waiting in line for more than an hour.
“I think it’ll be beneficial for sure, because it’s attracting a bit of attention from other places in Canada,” Hanson said of its impact on the hockey community.
“I think as it gets closer we’ll start talking about it a lot more, because there’s going to be a lot of hype about it.”
Dale Cebuliak had been waiting in line for just 30 minutes.
“We don’t get to see hockey at this caliber in Whitehorse very often,” he said.
“I’ve been here for 15 years and this will be the first game I’ve gotten to see up here at this caliber of hockey.”
