Yorkton Terriers making financial comeback thanks to community support

Yorkton’s "Save the Terriers" ticket blitz fundraiser reached half of its goal this year, essentially saving the junior hockey team for another season.

Earlier in the month, the Terriers admitted the club was experiencing a financial crisis stemming from a lack of consistent fundraising efforts, a loss of revenue from season cancellations due to the pandemic, in addition to the accumulation of loan and credit card debt over the past few years.

However, the club was able to make a financial comeback after selling over 600 tickets for the 2024-2025 season.

“It’s been absolutely amazing, the community has come out, and drove, to buy tickets,” Director of Marketing for the Yorkton Terriers Calvin Tokarchuk explained.

“We’re actually over three times of how many [tickets] we sold for this current season, next year looks amazing.”

• Download the CTV News app to get breaking news alerts from across Saskatchewan sent to your device

The fundraiser involved selling tickets for next year’s season for $200 each for single tickets and $400 each for a family pack. Every individual who purchased a ticket during the month of February had their name entered into a draw to win a travel voucher worth $4,000. The draw date was March 1.

“Originally the idea was to make sure that we can offer affordable tickets to absolutely everyone, because without fans playing hockey, it’s just playing hockey,” Tokarchuk said.

“We need the fans so we wanted to make sure we offered great value to our fans so they could be at the games. The other goal of the ticket blitz was to get to about 1,000 tickets sold so we could take a big hack out of the debt we’re currently in,” he added.

According to a statement from the team, it costs over $700,000 to operate the club per season.

Although the Terriers will be able to operate for the rest of this season and continue to run for next year’s, Tokarchuk said the club’s fundraising efforts are not nearly done.

"We are in a much better financial position than we were four and a half weeks ago. Again, we still have some work to do, a lot of work, and that's going to come in a way of fundraisers and other creative ideas to bring extra money into the arena,” he explained.

“Hopefully we continue to work on the product on the ice to better entertain the fans, and the product off the ice to say thank you to the fans."

Tokarchuk added that the Terriers will continue to work with other local community groups for new fundraising ideas.

“We’ve got a great fundraiser coming up it’s the celebrity sports dinner being put on by the Kinsmen on April 20,” he said.

“I’ve also heard some rumours about a ladies night coming up in the fall, potentially some concert type of things, and we’re also working on doing some other things potentially with the team, things like Chase the Ace, football drafts, stuff like that.”