By Jeff D'Andrea

Icehawks plan to restructure into a commnity based hockey team

Nov 25, 2011 | 5:39 AM

Since the Prince Albert Icehawks franchise was founded back in 2008, it has been run as a non-profit organization and backed only by the team’s governors, Allen Pasloski and Blair Madsen.

But that will all change as the Icehawks announced Thursday that they will be restructuring into a community based hockey team to get more people involved with running the team, in order for it to grow.

“It’s been kind of a one or two person show for the last three years and we just need to get more help, more volunteers to help and we want to expand the team,” said Pasloski, who is not only the team’s governor, but also the president and general manager.

“Before, there wasn’t a board besides the two of us, so we’re going to the community and setting a team up and actually creating a board, getting elected directors to the team,” he said.

“We’ve got more businesses that are coming in now to financially back the time and it’s just perfect timing to get it done.”

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The reason this wasn’t done in the first place was that Pasloski believed it would be tough to get enough interest in the club right away. He and Madsen wanted to make sure the team had enough support and was going to be solid financially.

After its first three seasons, Pasloski believes the team has matured financially and is even projecting a surplus for this season.

“In the first three years, it was pretty tough to start a community based team just from scratch, so we decided the best thing to do was to start it the way we did, get it on good financial ground and hand it off to a board,” said Pasloski.

The support has been there as well for the Icehawks and their support from the business community and their fans has grown each year.

“It’s been excellent,” said Pasloski. “Every year, we get more and more sponsors for our programs, we’ve got more people coming out and people that haven’t seen Junior B hockey for several years.”

The Icehawks will hold a meeting in order to elect a new board Dec. 12 at the Best Western Marquis Inn at 7 p.m.

jdandrea@panow.com