The Kenai River Brown Bears Junior A hockey team and the North American Hockey League are continuing planning and preparations to ensure a Junior A hockey season for the 2020-21 season. The Brown Bears have developed COVID-19 protocols for testing and quarantining, travel and return to play.
Kenai River Brown Bears General Manager Chris Hedlund explains roadblocks faced by the Brown Bears in preparing for upcoming season.
“Mainly it’s travel. The testing, the isolation process and then you get down to when you come back to Alaska-anywhere on the road, honestly; if players get tested positive or somehow come down with symptoms, because we are a symptom-based strategy we’re using as a league, and we have to isolate players you start adding costs form the hotel and the lodging sites if you have to isolate them. You also start getting to the point where if you don’t have enough players, you can’t play a game. That makes it hard to not have a for sure on that side. Then you start looking at the facilities and the requirements that the city and the state have; maybe, the quantity of fans. To come back for 250 fans is a challenge. We are hoping to get at least fifty percent capacity so that we can come back and have a good crowd and get the revenues that we need to pay the bills.”
The NAHL announced in late July that the start of the 2020-21 season would be moved back to October 9th. The league stating that they were committed to playing a full schedule of regular season games for the 2020-21 hockey season. The revised schedule will be released in mid-September.
Hedlund comments on schedule…
“We’re on a revised schedule, the second schedule. We are actually, potentially looking at a third revision depending on (to your point earlier) we have had two teams go dormant for the season and we don’t know if any more will happen in the next few weeks.”