Have we seen the last of KIBIHT?

From The Daily News of June 17 . . .

By GREGG DRINNAN
Daily News Sports Editor
The way Fred Cavanagh sees it, the Kamloops International Bantam Ice Hockey Tournament is dead.
“Where it sits right now,” Cavanagh, the KIBIHT president for the last 15 years, said Monday, “is that it looks like it’s a done deal . . . unless something changes in the next couple of weeks, which I highly doubt, my gut feeling is no.
“It doesn’t look good. So . . . I guess that’s it.”
Wanting to change the format of the annual tournament and unable to get dates from the City of Kamloops, Cavanagh said he doesn’t see any other option.
Byron McCorkell, the City’s director of parks, recreation and cultural services, doesn’t see it that way.
“I don’t know why he thinks it’s dead,” McCorkell said. “They could run it the same way they’ve run it for the last 40 years.”
The 40th annual tournament, featuring 24 bantam boys teams, ran April 8-13. But before it got underway Cavanagh, as has become commonplace, had to make some last-minute alterations.
“I replaced a minimum of eight and probably 10 teams within the last three weeks,” he said. “It’s a joke.”
KIBIHT always has been a tournament for club teams. But more and more governing bodies are holding spring camps that conflict with KIBIHT, so teams end up pulling out of the tournament.
“We have to deal with governing bodies that take away these clubs for their own all-star formats,” Cavanagh said. “What I’m trying to do is put elite (teams) on the ice and I can’t do it under the present conditions.
“So we decided we have to come to some kind of a deal and try to figure something out that’s going to work and keep this tournament going.”
Cavanagh and his executive decided they were going to have to switch to an all-star format and hold their tournament later in the spring.
“I made a lot of phone calls to a lot of people across Canada and the United States,” he said. “We decided this spring hockey is the way to go.
“It’s basically what these governing bodies are doing with their under-16s and their Alberta Cups and what have you. Only in this case, it would be us and you wouldn’t be under anybody’s umbrella.”
This format, Cavanagh said, would be a lot easier to put together, too, because “you just take (the rosters), check their ages, their ages are good, get them out on the ice and everybody was more or less equal.”
On top of all that, such a move would have allowed KIBIHT to ice a 12-team female division, something it had tried to do, without success, for two years.
“When we tried to do it,” Cavanagh said, “we found that the only way you’re going to be able to do it is with all-star spring hockey.”
Cavanagh said he wasn’t going to have any trouble finding 36 teams to take part in the next KIBIHT.
“In phone calls to Alberta, which has quite a few girls teams, they thought it was a tremendous idea,” he said. As for boys teams, he added: “We wouldn’t have teams pulling out. They’re begging to get in.”
So, Cavanagh said, the decision was made to switch to all-star teams and proposed dates for the 2009 tournament— April 28 through May 2 — were presented to the City.
“We threw some dates at them,” Cavanagh said, “and they just flat out said, ‘No, you can’t have the ice.’
“They sat there and they listened to us and they agreed it’s a good idea. But they basically said . . . we’ve got a gun show and an RV show and whatever show in April and lacrosse takes over the arenas in May and that’s it.
“So I said, ‘Well, I guess that’s it.’ ”
McCorkell said it all comes down to the McArthur Island Sports and Event Centre being booked.
“We go into dry floor in the Sports Centre as soon as hockey gets out, which is the end of KIBIHT,” he explained, “and we have one month of trade shows. And we’ve moved all our trade shows into that facility.
“For us to move (dates) when you’re moving that great a distance in time is very difficult to do because you’re impacting a number of other users. It’s not that we can’t, it’s just that it’s extrremely difficult.”
McCorkell said that the City would like to see KIBIHT maintain the status quo.
“From our end,” he said, “the tournament ran this year. Yes, it’s difficult but it does run. If we’re going to go to an all-star format, it’s a whole different game and we presented some thoughts on that to him as far as what would be the best time.
“But our facilities are booked solid and it’s difficult to be as liquid as we might have been able to be 20 years ago when they weren’t.”
It would seem then that KIBIHT, at least as it’s been known for 40 years, has at least one foot in the grave. And the other foot is on a banana peel.
“The Hockey News ranked it No. 1 in the world,” Cavanagh said. “So if we have to go, let’s go out on top. It beats the hell out of going out on the bottom.”
gdrinnan@kamloopsnews.ca