Time For Waterloo Region & The Kitchener Rangers To Grow Up: We Need Semi-Pro Hockey, Not Amateur Junior Hockey At The Aud 

Waterloo Region is known to be a forward-thinking, innovative community. There are countless examples of people and organizations coming up with ideas or creative solutions to issues that set the standard for neighbouring communities, and often even all of Ontario, or Canada, or the world. 

Blackberry, the first wireless email and internet connectivity handheld device; tiny-home communities to address homelessness (Better Tent City, Erbs Road shelter); the blue-box recycling program; a small-scale, low-budget light-rail service in the ION (Kitchener-Waterloo is smallest populated area in North America to have a light-rail service), to name a few.

Now it’s time to lead the way in making fundamental changes to the way we support and run non-NHL hockey teams in Canada: with the 2018 Team Canada World Junior Hockey team group sexual assault trial going on with the verdict to be announced next week, and all sorts of new reports and allegations of abuse by players on members of the community, hazing of young adult players on rookie teenagers, tyrannical, and abusive coaching and management tactics, fights and other violent plays leading young men to have physical and psychological damage for life while also potentially taking away their opportunity to make up for it financially through playing pro - it should be apparent to everyone that junior hockey in Canada is wrought with unethical behaviour and corrupt systemic issues, and something needs to change.

One person or one city can’t change the whole system but here’s my solution for us here in Waterloo Region: sell the branding and other organizational assets to a private owner or public-private consortium and replace the OHL/CHL Kitchener Rangers with a semi-professional ECHL or AHL Kitchener Rangers, either through relocation of an existing franchise or through applying for expansion.

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I want to make it clear, I am a huge fan of hockey and have been a diehard fan of the Kitchener Rangers since I went to my first game when I was 5 years old (which interestingly was in October of the last season the Rangers won the Memorial Cup in 2002-2003). 

It would be as sad for me as anyone to see them leave the beloved Ontario Hockey League - my brother and I have been to all 20 OHL arenas for a game, we’ve gotten to know the teams histories in terms of on-ice success, player pro-development success, and branding success. I also read the sports page of this newspaper every morning as a kid to read about the Rangers or check scores of other games in the OHL (before the internet became more prevalent). I even grew up playing computer games learning about hockey on OHLKids.com when it existed back in the late 2000s decade! My Grade 5 class was assigned the now-rebranded P.E.I. Rocket at the Kitchener 2008 Memorial Cup to do research on and display and that week of hockey festivities at The Aud was one of the highlights of my childhood (although the result of the championship game was one of the saddest moments of my childhood). And of course I looked up to all the Kitchener Rangers players and aspired to be like them. It was always awe-inspiring to be able to meet them and get autographs at the annual Labour Day Rangers’ Fan BBQ, other events, or spontaneous sightings and meetups in the community.

But we have to separate our emotional attachments, nostalgia, and reliance on the good feelings of tradition from our reasoning and decision-making. It’s time for the Kitchener Rangers organization to “grow up” and become a professional organization where players are adults and are paid. 

Being a teenage boy or young adult man with hormonal changes, burgeoning physical growth, strength and reasoning, and changes in how you relate to others is hard enough without having the weight of an entire city on cheering you on to beat the Brantford Bulldogs or the stacked London Knights (who have branded themselves on Twitter is the past as a “mini-NHL” team - without the compensation or protection of a players association that NHL players have), doing interviews, signing autographs, attending charitable events, having your name and images put on jumbotrons, reported on, and sold on merchandise, etc. This kind of working environment needs to be chosen voluntarily (as in without parental or minor hockey coach or junior hockey team executive pressure), and players need to be compensated accordingly to the work they do.

I have only attended three semi-professional games, all “Triple-A”/”Tier 1” semi-pro American Hockey League (AHL) games - one in Belleville, one in Toronto, one in Winnipeg. They were all as enjoyable of a game to attend as an OHL game (really it’s only the passionate and technical-minded fans who know or care about the differences in level of play of hockey games, many people attend for the fun atmosphere, and cultural significance of it). The AHL has two more Canadian teams in addition to these ones: the Laval Rocket, and the Abbotsford Canucks, who just won the 2025 Calder Cup championship - their first, against the Charlotte Checkers a few weeks ago. 

The East Coast Hockey League (ECHL) which could be designated as “Double-A” or “Tier 2” semi-pro, only has one Canadian team currently in the Trois-Riveriers Lions but have had teams in other Canadian cities such as Brampton, Ontario, St. John’s, Newfoundland, and Victoria, British Columbia in the past.

Abbotsford, British Columbia is a very good example of a similar sized city that we could model an AHL business setup after: they are actually smaller in size of population than Kitchener with 160,000, and are a similar distance to the nearest NHL city of Vancouver as we are to Toronto. 

According to a recent CityNews Vancouver article (https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2025/06/17/abbotsford-canucks-calder-cup-economic-boost/), Abbotsford mayor Ross Siemens claimed the recent Calder Cup run and win had a significant economic benefit to the local economy through restaurant and bar sales, and also through putting the city on the map to Americans where most of the AHL teams are based (likely evident given the league name), which is great for tourism for the city.

A lot of difficult conversations would have to be had, and there would need to be a widespread effort to make the changes and make it happen, but if we want to continue to be known not only an innovative, and forward-thinking region, but a world-class, professional-hockey region, we need to consider replacing the OHL logo uniquely plastered on the bottom-left-hand corner of the Kitchener Rangers logo with an ECHL or AHL logo, and replace amateur hockey with professional hockey at the Kitchener Memorial Auditorium as soon as possible.