Road Trip This Season

I have to admit that some of my best memories from my amateur broadcasting career have come from when we've followed the Manitoba Bisons women's hockey team on the road. Our trip to London, Ontario to witness and call the women winning the school's first U SPORTS National Championship in school history was pretty epic, and the trip we took to Charlottetown, PEI the following year was just as fun despite falling short in their quest for a second championship banner. Needless to say, there have been some fond memories made in following the team in our coverage of the seasons.

With Canada West having announced that the season will only be twenty games long for each of the nine teams this year, it means we'll only have ten weeks of coverage on UMFM and/or the UMFM Second Stream. Because each team plays half their season at home, that means you only get ten home games of coverage as well.

In any normal 28-game season, we'd offer up fourteen games of coverage with each of the teams visiting Manitoba once and vice versa, but that's not happening this season based on math alone. However, because I have always put the coverage of these student-athletes far ahead of my own personal wants or needs, I think we're going to have a 14-game broadcast schedule this year.

If and when Canada West announces the 2021-22 hockey schedule, we already know that Manitoba will play two additional games against both the Regina Cougars and the Saskatchewan Huskies in order to make up the four games needed to bring the schedule to a round number of twenty games. That means there will be two games at Wayne Fleming Arena for each of those teams and Manitoba will visit those cities for two more games.

Saddle up, folks, because this UMFM chatterbox is headed west to Saskatchewan to call four additional games!

Ok, let me be clear: none of this has been cleared by UMFM yet, and I am simply putting a few feelers out there to see if this is something Bisons fans want to hear. Because the host schools get the webcast rights, it would only be via a streaming radio option that we can broadcast this, so don't expect any sort of streaming video to happen either. This is strictly and solely a streaming radio option if we can make everything work.

This also might be a solo broadcast depending on the schedule of others such as Kyleigh Palmer and Jason Pchajek who have done Bisons women's hockey broadcasts with me in the past. I've done a few solo games at the Female World Sport School Challenge, and it's not as hard as it may seem as long as I'm on top of everything. I'd love to have a second person on the broadcasts for a myriad of reasons, but we'll see how that goes as well.

All in all, I'm looking at two treks out to Saskatchewan, possibly in the dead of winter, to call four more games because I believe these women deserve the coverage. On the heels of a success Secret Dream Gap Tour stop in Calgary and seeing how much those women missed the game, I can only imagine how badly the nine teams of Canada West are missing the game and the competition.

In saying this, I await the Canada West schedule to be released so I can book my adventures into Saskatchewan where I'll visit Merlis Belsher Place and the Cooperators Centre if everything gets green-lit. The women deserve the coverage after having seen a full season of hockey missed, so I'm gonna make the extra effort to see this through.

Get out to your local rink and support the highest level of continuous women's hockey that Canada has to offer! See you at the rink!

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!