Comment 53922

By jason (registered)
Posted December 29, 2010 at 08:33:12

I hope this works out and we can get some much needed focus on the velodrome at the west harbour. it has gobs of potential if done right, and now we'll have the money to do it right. Seeing the sudden interest in private business people for the Aldershot site shows quite clearly that the Cats already decided long ago that they weren't going to stay in Hamilton proper.
Many cities have their sports team in a close suburb (although many have moved back to their downtowns in the past decade).
The Cats must have thought that there was a big enough appetite among Hamiltonians to pay close to 100% of the cost of this project simply to keep the team here. They were way wrong.
I personally won't sit in an hour long traffic jam with 22,000 other people all trying to get off on the same exit and park in the only parking lot, but many people will. This seems to be the best scenario for the Cats. They'll need to work harder than they realize though to grab new customers to replace the ones they have lost through this process. Putting a great team on the field must be priority number 1 if they expect turned off fans to come back to their team.

10 years from now once the novelty of a new stadium wears off and people grumble about "that stupid stadium and it's traffic jams" and Burlington is forced to come up with subsidies every year we'll look back on this and be glad that they landed in Aldershot. We can still watch our team without having to subsidize them for the rest of our lives.

And within 2-3 decades there will be a move to either take the team to a brand new city, or put them in downtown Hamilton....40 years later than most other North American sports teams, but that's what happens with bad partners, bad advice and old thinking among the team management.

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