Say goodbye to the Wenatchee Wild.
The team's request to join the B.C. Hockey League's Mainland Division was granted this week at the league's annual general meeting and the Wild will join the Interior Division for 2016-17.
Depending on how you look at it, that might be a good thing for the Prince George Spruce Kings, who will no longer have to face the Wild frequently as a divisional opponent.
The Wild ran roughshod over the Spruce Kings last season, winning all seven regular season games while outscoring the Kings a combined 46-13. But it was much closer in the playoffs and the Kings just about forced Game 7 in their first-round series with the Wild, if not for a late-game comeback by Wenatchee in Game 6.
The Spruce Kings and Wild will face each other just twice next season, once in Wenatchee and once in Prince George.
"I'm glad we don't have to travel all that distance down to Wenatchee (a 13-hour trip from Prince George) but I liked having them in there), I think it made our division a lot more competitive," said Spruce Kings general manager Mike Hawes, who represented the Spruce Kings at the AGM in Richmond with outgoing team president Tom Bohmer, who is moving to Calgary.
"Arguably, the Interior's always been the better division within our league but I would say last year with Wenatchee, Chilliwack, Langley and ourselves, the Mainland Division was the stronger division. But it is for the betterment of the league and we'll see how that plays out."
The Wild competed in the Mainland Division for two seasons since joining the league in 2014. Now with just five teams in the Mainland Division, four of them will make the playoffs. The seven-team Interior Division playoff format will also be revamped, with details still to be determined. Last year, the top two Interior teams drew a first-round playoff bye.
The league has also agreed to begin baseline concussion testing on all players, to be completed at the 2017 Bauer Showcase in Chilliwack, Sept. 20-24. When new players join the league, they will also undergo the tests, which will provide athletic trainers data which will be available through a cell phone app and will be used for comparison testing in the event a player suffers a head injury during the season.
"More details on it are going to come out as the summer moves on from the company that's going to be providing the service to us," said Hawes. "The trainers just need to go into the app and then they can take the player into a quiet area and run a test that will be provided on the app to see how far off baseline that player is and make a determination on a possible concussion or not."
The league also renewed its contract with the Canadian Mental Health Association and its Talk Today Program which connects players with a CMHA liaison for referrals for mental health and addictions support.
All 17 teams will be required this year to have high definition video equipment to record home games for webcasts on fasthockey.com. Hawes said the Spruce Kings upgraded to high-definition late last season, with notable improvements in the video quality of the webcasts.
The league will be adding resources to its Ultimate Toolkit program to promote fan engagement and ticket sales. The program was introduced for the 2017 playoffs and league-wide playoff attendance increased 24 per cent.
The BCHL's first-ever exposure camp, July 1-3 in Richmond, is completely full with 132 players registered. The program is designed to help elite players learn what's expected of them as they approach the junior A level, with games and practices run by BCHL coaches.
In other BCHL news, Wenatchee Wild governor David White was named executive of the year and Chilliwack Chiefs director of marketing Barry Douglas was picked as marketer of the year.
The Spruce Kings' training camp starts Aug. 24 at Rolling Mix Concrete Arena with three exhibition games lined up for the Kings before the season starts Friday, Sept. 8.
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