Do the Oilers play in Canada’s best sports town? Edmonton returns to the spotlight & More News Here

In Edmonton, Okay-97 is an FM radio station recognized for its strict adherence to traditional rock staples comparable to Led Zeppelin — it runs a golf promotion known as “Fairways to Heaven” — and for selling massive music occasions round city. It can also be recognized, for now, as one thing else fully.

Earlier this month, Okay-97 adopted a brand new title: Konnor 97.

The station made the change as the Edmonton Oilers had been starting their second-round playoff collection with the Calgary Flames, and it’ll stay in impact throughout the NHL’s Western Conference ultimate. Jeff Murray, the program director at Konnor 97, can’t say for sure that Connor McDavid, the station’s namesake, truly enjoys traditional rock, however that’s beside the level.

“People from the outside look at it like maybe it’s a northern outpost,” he stated. “We don’t think we’re in the middle of nowhere. We’re just here, and sports fans in this city are incredibly passionate.”

The Oilers final made a convention ultimate look in 2006, then promptly missed the playoffs in every of the following 10 seasons. With their long-awaited return engagement, with the Colorado Avalanche, the crew is lifting Edmonton again to centre stage, the place it arguably basks as Canada’s best sports city.

A middle-aged sports fan in Northern Alberta has lived via a couple of sports dynasty, first with the native Canadian Football League crew successful 5 straight Grey Cup titles in the Seventies, then with a hockey crew led by Wayne Gretzky.

Local followers have stuffed Commonwealth Stadium for worldwide observe and area. They helped introduce many Canadians to Christine Sinclair via the sheer quantity of followers in the seats. They could be credited — and maybe additionally blamed — for the NHL’s heat embrace of out of doors hockey video games throughout the season.

The metropolis’s sports historical past even has its personal Canadian Heritage Minute.

“Yes, we know it gets cold,” stated Reid Wilkins, a sports radio host with 630 CHED. “We know we’re farther north than pretty much any city this size in the world. We know the Oilers missed the playoffs for 10 years. But there’s also a lot of really good things.”

Supporting massive occasions in droves won’t be tied to a chip on the civic shoulder, he stated, however it’s shut.

“The whole country doesn’t have to be about Toronto and Vancouver,” stated Wilkins. “And Alberta doesn’t have to be all about Banff and Calgary. I think there’s a little bit about that there.”

As the Oilers dispatched the Los Angeles Kings in the first spherical, after which emerged victorious in the first Battle of Alberta since 1991, Wilkins stated he has seen a gentle transition round city. Friends and relations who won’t usually be diehard sports followers have began debating ice time and depth gamers on the roster.

There are extra texts about the Oilers, and a heavier presence on social media. Wilkins has been internet hosting reveals from inside Rogers Place when the crew is taking part in on the highway, and hundreds of followers have been heading downtown to watch the video games on massive screens.

“Bars are rocking,” stated former Oilers defenceman Jason Strudwick. “People are having friends over, watching it on their deck. Group chats are all about: ‘Who is Kadri going to play against?’ It’s just amazing. There is an energy to it.”

Strudwick performed greater than 650 common season video games in the NHL, with different stops in Vancouver, New York and Chicago. He selected to make Edmonton his dwelling in retirement, and he has turn into a fixture as a neighborhood radio persona at TSN 1260.

In 2001, when Edmonton hosted the IAAF World Championships in Athletics, Strudwick purchased a 10-day go, although he didn’t know a lot about the sports. It had extra to do with the surroundings, he stated: “You go down there and people are all experts, loving it and sitting in the stands.”

When a overseas correspondent attacked the metropolis in print, it turned a world incident. A reporter with the Daily Telegraph, a newspaper based mostly in London, known as the metropolis a “visually unappealing corner of Canada,” and referred to it derisively as “Deadmonton.”

Edmonton was not amused and the reporter, Robert Philip, revealed a follow-up column: “As a result of all this, to which I plead guilty, I cannot now walk through my hotel lobby without being shadowed by an intrepid TV interviewer and cameraman complete with lights and boom microphone.”

The metropolis was again in the information due to one other worldwide occasion the following summer season, besides this time it was for surprising organizers with the quantity of assist. More than 37,000 followers paid to watch Canada beat Brazil 2-1 in their semifinal match at the under-19 ladies’s world championship, main then-FIFA president Sepp Blatter to declare, “nowhere in the world would we have such a crowd” for the occasion.

Canada misplaced to the U.S. in the ultimate, however with greater than 47,000 followers in the stadium. It was the starting of an period for the Canadian ladies’s crew and, as Sinclair informed reporters: “Even when we lost they were still screaming for us.”

In 2003, the Oilers hosted the Canadiens at Commonwealth Stadium. The temperature dipped to minus-30 Celsius with windchill — Canadiens goaltender José Theodore supplied the enduring picture, with a toque above his facemask to keep heat — with greater than 57,000 followers watching from the seats.

“There’s something for everybody here — you can play softball until midnight here,” stated Jed Roberts, who spent greater than a decade as a particular groups star for the metropolis’s CFL crew. “The winters are so long and so brutally cold that, as soon as the days start getting longer, everybody hits the bricks and starts getting outside.”

Roberts was a second-generation CFL participant, after his father spent seven years taking part in with the Ottawa Rough Riders. Roberts and his father each gained the Grey Cup throughout their respective careers: “When I was coming here, he kind of gave me the heads-up: ‘You’re heading into what’s basically the Cadillac of CFL franchises.’”

Like Strudwick, Roberts made Edmonton his post-career dwelling.

“I think the people that live here feed off the misconception that we’re just a bunch of rubes here, and we all drive pickup trucks and we like to shake our fist at anybody who doesn’t share the same values we do,” he stated. “That’s not the case at all. It’s a wonderful place. Everybody just comes out in droves.”

Victor Cui is a sports government who was raised in Edmonton and was named president of the Elks in January. He has lived abroad: “Most people in Edmonton don’t realize that this sense of community does not exist in most other cities.”

He used Shanghai for instance.

“You walk onto an elevator in Shanghai, you don’t say hello to strangers — they’ll think you’re crazy,” Cui stated with a chuckle. “Whereas in Edmonton, if you step on to an elevator and you don’t say, ‘Hey, good morning,’ people are like, ‘That guy’s so rude.’”

A bit of Edmonton’s civic and sports tradition is exported throughout Canada for one week every November, as a part of the lead-up to the Grey Cup. A bunch of 15 volunteers organizes a celebration generally known as “The Spirit of Edmonton,” which often takes up a big ballroom in a neighborhood lodge or convention centre in the host metropolis, and turns into a central social hub for CFL followers.

“We invite everybody into our room,” stated Spirit committee chairman Gerry Haracsi. “We want you to represent every city you’re from. It’s not too often you’ll see somebody Calgary and Edmonton people hugging each other, but in the Spirit of Edmonton, you’re going to see them shake hands.”

The volunteers use their trip time to employees the weeklong occasion, which has roots again to 1974.

“You can wear a suit and tie if you want to,” he stated. “But we don’t encourage it. We want you to wear your team colours and represent like you would if you were in your own home, in your basement.”

At Konnor 97, the color scheme is a little more restrictive. The station’s emblem has some blue, it has some orange, and it has some very apparent allegiances to a sure participant.

“A handful of people think, ‘Hey, it’s maybe disrespectful to the other players on the team,’ until we explain the correlation of 97,” stated Murray, the program director. “Plus, the name would be way too long if we listed as ‘All-the-players-names 97.’”

He stated the station has not obtained any official suggestions from the Oilers: “And I’m going to guess that the other Connor 97 is way too preoccupied to worry about what the hell we’re doing.”

(Photo:  Artur Widak / NurPhoto through Getty Images)

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