The state of the WHL from commissioner Dan Near

I think that there's a lot of strength. Obviously, three community-held teams in Prince Albert, Moose Jaw, Swift Current, I think creates a concentration that really is maybe more community-feeling than anywhere else in the league. But I think you've got competitive clubs. You've got players leaving a little earlier for the NCAA. You've got a few more Euros and a few more Americans in the league. And I think at one point in time, there were teams like Swift Current that would say, it's harder for us to get somebody from the U.S. to come and play here and we just did a little circuit of the locker room and I think in total there might be seven players here this year who are not Canadian. Everybody in our league is learning that progression to the NCAA at the conclusion whatever that is of your Western Hockey League career is generally a good thing and people should be optimistic enthusiastic about it. There's really just the tension around when is the right time for each player. We're all going to have to do things a little differently than we have in the past. It costs more every year to operate. It costs more to live, right? The rest and recovery and training and mental health and all the things that we do for players is going up. And so naturally, you have to generate more revenue to be able to do that. I don't think we can have a world where clubs can afford to be out of the playoffs for two, three or four years at a time. Just because we want to chase a ring, we're going to have to have more stability. And I think we to get a little bit more sophisticated in how we interact with our fans we need more season ticket holders we probably need in the long run an average a higher average ticket price but to be able to recruit players to be competitive with the NCAA and retain them when everybody's talking about all the great things that could happen somewhere else we've got to be great here a byproduct of all of this is we've emerged as the best development league when when it was previously fragmented right? You had players that were going to the USHL, you had players that were going to the BCHL, the Alberta Junior League, the Saskatchewan Junior League, and us. Now, you'll be hard-pressed to find a draft pick from the West that doesn't come to the Western Hockey League, whether it's for one year, two years, three years, four years. There's a lot of different entities and parties that would like to be the streaming partner of ours. We're using YouTube right now as a bridge, and we'll be presenting at the board meeting in November a variety of options, probably three or four different options. We have Chilliwack identified as a market that we would like to move into pretty deep in the process as far as negotiating with an exclusive group there and hope to have something to announce fairly soon.