The Bonnyville Senior Pontiacs will be flying all the way out to Whitehorse next month for a weekend of exhibition games as they get ready for another season.
“Whitehorse has a team up there but they have no league to play in,” explains Senior Pontiacs board member Floyd Isley, “Every year they usually bring up a few teams to play against. They pay for the flights and the hotel rooms up there. I guess they get pretty good crowds. Probably over the course of a weekend they get about 5,000 coming out to watch. Probably about 2,500 a game.”
The Pontiacs will be heading up with two other teams from the North Central Hockey League, Daysland and Whitecourt. Whitecourt went up to play the Huskies last year, winning one game and losing the other. It’s been a long time since the Senior Pontiacs travelled up north, “I guess the Senior Pontiacs did years and years ago” says Isley “This will probably be the first time in at least the last twenty years that I know of.”
Isley adds the team is very excited, “We’ve got a lot of guys that are pretty itching to go up there. We’re rebuilding the team a bit. We had some guys that moved on, retired from playing hockey, moved to other places, things like that. We’re just in the process of finding a few players but we’ll have a team together.”