List Of Ice Hockey Teams In Saskatchewan
The province of Saskatchewan is home to five Western Hockey League teams, twelve Junior A teams – eleven in the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League and one in the Alberta Junior Hockey League – and one Junior B league comprising thirteen teams. The province is also home to two universities teams playing in the Canada West Universities Athletic Association and one college team that plays in the Alberta Colleges Athletics Conference.
The first professional ice hockey teams in Saskatchewan were the Regina Capitals and the Saskatoon Sheiks who first played in the Western Canada Hockey League's (WCHL) inaugural season in 1921–22. After the collapse of the WCHL following the 1925–26 season, these teams and the Moose Jaw Maroons joined the Prairie Hockey League (PHL). The PHL folded after two season, which resulted in the end of professional hockey in Saskatchewan. In 1952 professional hockey returned to Saskatchewan when the Saskatoon Quakers joined the minor-pro Western Hockey League (WHL). The Quakers folded in 1956 and were replaced by the Saskatoon/St. Paul Regals who split their home games between Saskatoon and St. Paul, Minnesota for the 1957–58 season. The following season, the Regals became the second incarnation of the Saskatoon Quakers, abandoning St. Paul, but folded after just one season, leaving the province without professional hockey once again. Since then, there have been a number of attempts to return professional hockey to Saskatchewan. In 1983, a bid to buy and relocate the National Hockey League's St. Louis Blues to Saskatoon was vetoed by the NHL, who preferred to find an owner to keep the team in St. Louis. In 2009, Ice Edge attempted to purchase the bankrupt Phoenix Coyotes with a plan to keep the team in Phoenix, but to also play five home games a year in Saskatoon. However, The Conference Board of Canada has reported that Saskatoon's population of approximately 250,000 is well below the minimum 750,000 required for an NHL team to survive economically. Additionally, Saskatoon was rumoured as a possible destination for the American Hockey League Manitoba Moose after the Atlanta Thrashers relocated to Winnipeg in 2011. However, the Moose eventually relocated to St. John's, Newfoundland, due in part to the presence of the Saskatoon Blades occupancy of the Credit Union Centre.
The first recorded Provincial Junior Hockey League was organized in the 1916–17, when E.C. Corbeau donated the Corbeau Cup. The first champions were the Regina Arenas. The 1916–17 season was also the first season of the Regina Pats, who are the oldest continuously operating junior team in Canada. In 1919 the Saskatchewan Amateur Hockey Association created the Abbott Cup in memory of E.L. (Hick) Abbott who died in the First World War. The Abbot Cup was originally awarded to the best Junior "A" team in Western Canada. After Western Hockey League was sanctioned as the top junior league in Western Canada and the creation of the Ed Chynoweth Cup, the Abbot Cup was awarded to the best junior "B" team in Western Canada until 1999 when the trophy was retired.
Organized women's hockey has been played in Saskatchewan since at least 1912 when a women's team was set up at the University of Saskatchewan. However, as women's hockey only became a Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) sport in 1997–98, they played unsactioned competitions against other university and local women's teams, winning the Western Canadian women’s inter-university hockey league champion in 1921 and 1922. They also won the Saskatoon women's city championship in 1929, 1932, 1939 and 1942. Women's hockey was an intramural sport between 1955 and 1976, before the creation of the Labatt Cup: Women’s Hockey Tournament, later renamed the Western Canada Cup, in 1979. The University of Saskatchewan played in the first CIS sanctioned women's championship in the 1997–98 season, while the University of Regina women's team joined one year later. The University of Regina won their first, and only, conference title in 2000–01. In 2004, the Saskatchewan Prairie Ice began play in the minor-pro Western Women's Hockey League based out of Lumsden located near Regina. After three losing seasons the team folded in 2007 due to financial reasons. Saskatchewan has won one Abby Hoffman Cup, awarded to the Canadian senior women's "A" champion, won by the Notre Dame Hounds in 2010–11.
This list does not include teams below the junior age group, or senior teams below the AAA level.
Read more about List Of Ice Hockey Teams In Saskatchewan: Junior, League, Regional and National Championships
Famous quotes containing the words list of, list, ice and/or teams:
“The advice of their elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841–1935)
“Feminism is an entire world view or gestalt, not just a laundry list of women’s issues.”
—Charlotte Bunch (b. 1944)
“He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.”
—Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)
“A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not “studying a profession,” for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)