By Earl Seitz

Blazers 2020 Memorial Cup bid update

Apr 20, 2018 | 3:36 PM

KAMLOOPS — Kelowna 2020 Memorial Cup bid chair Tom Dias, “Kelowna is going to do an outstanding job in winning the bid for the 2020 Memorial Cup.”

But Kelowna’s not the only city bidding to host the Memorial Cup in two years. The Kamloops Blazers made their intentions known last November, and it’s expected the Victoria Royals will throw their hat in the ring.The committe putting together the Kamloops bid, has had a five month head start.

“We’re going through the process of putting together our business plan, budgets, those types of things.” says Kamloops 2020 Memorial Cup bid chair Norm Daley.

Norm Daley has spent five months working with an advisory board, with each person taking on a lead role in a specific area in a bid that has a June 1 deadline.

One Man's Opinion

COLLINS: 'Fairness' is not a word I would use to describe the federal budget

1h ago

Sound Off

SOUND OFF: The NDP's mishandling of drug use in B.C. hospitals

15h ago

ARMCHAIR MAYOR

ROTHENBURGER: Who would survive if we had a recall law for City councils?

Apr 18, 2024

“Our thought process is, we want to be able to have it that we’re not doing things at the last minute,”  says Daley. “We want to be able to have people look at it and say ‘hey, have you thought about this – if you put this in, or did that.’ We’re trying to make it that it’s best foot forward that we can put into this project and make sure we’re successful in the bid.”

That’s a lot of this and that’s, but just like the game on the ice, the bid process is a competitive market, so the finalized bid will stay under wraps until its time to present it to the Western Hockey League board of governors.    

Says Daley, “I think we have some pretty interesting ideas that we’ve come up with about how we’re going to host events, and how we’re going to do things. I’d rather that come out in October, than now, because I don’t want Kelowna to get any intel on us.”

Kamloops strengh in these kind of bids over the last 30 years, starting with the Canada Games in 1993, has been its people —- it’s best and strongest resource — sponsors and a volunteer base that come back event after event. Daly also says there’s another strength that Kamloops has when it comes to putting in bids for big events.

 “One thing is we’ve lost.”  says Daley,  ” So we understand  we didn’t get the 2013 women’s worlds (curling), we didn’t get the 2009 Olympic curling trials (curling).  So we’ve lost. So we understand where maybe there’s some shortcomings in what the bid process is when we did it those times —- so we have that understanding of what it takes to win, so we actually have won a number of other ones —- so that’s the big thing, we can take the information of what we maybe did wrong in those bids and use it for our advantage in this one.”

It’s bids in by June 1. Western League governors will pour over them over the summer, and are scheduled to meet October 3rd to vote on the winning bid for the 2020 Memorial Cup.