Riverhawks ‘building community’ as annual Canada Day game sells out

Staff and players with the Edmonton Riverhawks baseball team are preparing to host the annual Canada Day game. Connor Hogg has the details.

It was July 1, 2022. Year 1. And Kim Capjack remembers it well.

“We definitely weren’t expecting the crowd that we’ve got,” the food and beverage manager for the Edmonton Riverhawks said, recalling the demand for hot dogs, beer and the like when the team first held a Canada Day game.

And while it wasn’t a capacity crowd that day three years ago, the stands at ReMax Field have been packed ever since. Last year’s Canada Day game in the river valley ballpark that seats 9,200 was sold out.

Tuesday’s West Coast League game on the statutory holiday against the Port Angeles Lefties is, too.

But Capjack and the rest of the Riverhawks staff are ready for it. They started planning for this year’s game in January.

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“Looking back now, the crowd that we got in Year 1 is a very small crowd for us now, so there’s the shock that first year of what it actually looked like, but now we know, and we can be prepared,” Capjack told CTV News Edmonton.

Last week, while the team was on a road trip in British Columbia, Riverhawks employees were back home, busy getting ready for the big game.

Thousands of hot dogs, bottles of water and beer cups await Tuesday’s customers.

Ticketing staff are ready to quickly and efficiently guide fans through the gates and to their seats, which this year are assigned instead of general admission.

Maddie Murdoch, the Riverhawks’ game day and communications director, said the change to reserve seating should help avoid what happened to the team last year when they feared they were over capacity.

“I think it better serves the thousands of people (attending),” Murdoch told CTV News Edmonton. “We had issues in 2024 where we almost didn’t have enough seats for people in the building.”

Riverhawks players say they are looking forward to seeing a full house for the 7:05 p.m. game.

“It’s an added bonus to have more faces in the crowd cheering us on,” said James Brock, a pitcher from Burnaby, B.C., who’s one of the 19 Canadians who make up almost half the team’s roster

“You want to do well in front of your home crowd. I think that’s the biggest motivator aside from winning, really.”

The Canada Day game is the biggest one on the Riverhawks’ calendar, just as it was for previous tenants of ReMax Field.

The Edmonton Prospects, the Western Canada Baseball League team now known as the Spruce Groved-based Energy City Cactus Rats, called the ballpark home for eight years and were enjoying capacity crowds for their July 1 games in the Western Canada Baseball League by the time their lease ended in 2019.

ReMax Field opened as Telus Field in 1995 for the triple-A Trappers, a major league-affiliated outfit that routinely played to sellout and near-sellout crowds not just on Canada Day, but throughout the season, particularly in the ballpark’s early years, but certainly on weekends over the 10 years they played there.

After the Trappers left following the 2004 Pacific Coast League season for Round Rock, Texas, independent professional squads the Cracker-Cats and Capitals usually saw bigger, but not necessarily capacity, crowds for July 1 dates.

But then came the experiences of both the Prospects and the Riverhawks selling the place out.

Dan Mason, a professor of sport management at the University of Alberta, says enough time has passed from the halcyon days of the Trappers, who saw eight-million fans pass through the gates of their ballparks – Telus Field replaced the 5,200-capacity John Ducey Park on the same site – over their 24 years in Edmonton.

He told CTV News Edmonton a factor that may have contributed to the relative lack of success of the Trappers’ replacement pro teams “may have been the perception of the calibre of play.”

“We’re far enough removed now from the Trappers that people are just looking for an experience and doing something with their families,” Mason said.

“The baseball is certainly central to that, but it’s part of a sort of much bigger family experience or social experience that people might be having. I think some of the things that may have stopped true, diehard baseball fans from going to some of the successors of the Trappers, you’re not seeing that with the Riverhawks.”

Not only that, Mason says the team which plays a two-and-a-half-month schedule with collegiate players has done well “to promote and present itself as a desirable product” and as an alternative to pricier sports experiences such as the National Hockey League’s Edmonton Oilers, whose ticket prices start at about $100 per game.

An adult ticket to a Riverhawks game is $20.

“I think the landscape for viewing professional sport has changed in that the Oilers, for example, have priced themselves out of the market for a lot of people,” Mason said. “The more expensive Oilers tickets get, the more of a value the Riverhawks and other entertainment options that are sport-related seem to be.”

Murdoch says the Riverhawks are trying to “build community” to attract fans from a wide range of backgrounds. She said offering attractions alongside the baseball product helps the team bring more people to the ballpark not just for the Canada Day game – which will feature live music, special uniforms worn by the players and post-game fireworks – but for other ones, too.

Theme games highlighting communities such as the dog-centred ‘Paws in the Park,’ Pride night, South Asian heritage night and an Indigenous celebration night create “moments that make everybody feel welcome.”

“We love our traditional baseball fans – obviously, they’re a big part of what we do here – but we also understand there’s a lot of people in the city who aren’t huge baseball fans,” Murdoch said.

“(We wondered), ‘How do we make them want to come to a game and want to be included in what we’ve got going on down here?’”

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Connor Hogg