Atlantic Schooners - Current Status

Current Status

Fan desire for a team in the region remains strong. There is a group on Facebook that was formed in hopes of building a stadium and starting a franchise, which once had over 3,700 members.

One urban legend around the Halifax area is that the old scoreboard from the Foxboro Stadium is in a warehouse in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, left there awaiting the proposed stadium. Another legend is that J.I. Albrecht had already bought turf for the stadium. When the club folded he took the turf and threw it into the Atlantic Ocean.

On June 11, 2005, a CFL exhibition game, called "Touchdown Atlantic" between the Toronto Argonauts and Hamilton Tiger-Cats, was held in Halifax. This game served as a gauge for possible CFL expansion. The venue was Huskies Stadium (capacity 11 000) on the campus of St. Mary's University. Tickets for the event, which cost upwards of $60.00, sold out rapidly. The game ended in a 16–16 tie. Another CFL exhibition game would have taken place on June 3, 2006, but the suspension of the Ottawa Renegades, who were scheduled to play the game, forced the game to be cancelled altogether.

If Halifax had landed the 2014 Commonwealth Games, a stadium likely would have been built for the event, which would have removed a major hurdle facing Atlantic Canada's chances of getting a franchise; however, Halifax withdrew its bid for the games in early March 2007.

Nevertheless, a Schooners delegation took part in the festivities at the 2007 Grey Cup. A ninth CFL team has been located in Ottawa, meaning were the Schooners to join the league they would become the tenth club. The CFL has been extremely cautious about expansion in recent years, following the failed expansion into the United States of the mid 1990s and the failure of the Ottawa Renegades in 2005. It is believed that the league are keen to have a tenth team (Ottawa is slated to return to the CFL with a revamped franchise no later than 2014, which would give the league nine teams), with five in the eastern division and five in the west. This has been seen as supportive of the idea of a team in Halifax making the league "truly national".

Also in the Atlantic region of Canada, Moncton, New Brunswick (a city that is roughly 250 kilometres (160 mi) from Halifax, which is slightly longer than the distance between Ottawa and Montreal), built a 20,000-seat stadium (Moncton Stadium) to host the IAAF 2010 World Junior Championships in Athletics. There is also hope that the stadium will help land a CFL team for the city, someday. To test the feasibility of expansion to Moncton, a regular season game dubbed Touchdown Atlantic was played between the Toronto Argonauts and the Edmonton Eskimos on September 26, 2010. The game was won by Edmonton 24 – 6 and the game was played in front of a sellout crowd of 20,725 spectators. In TDII, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats defeated the Calgary Stampeders 55-36 on September 25, 2011.