PEORIA, Ariz. — He sat in the second row behind the plate at Peoria Stadium on a 90-degree afternoon, relaxing at a Seattle Mariners spring training game.
Bill Yuill has enjoyed a lot of days in the sun like this lately, not only while he has followed the Mariners in Arizona.
The expansion hockey team he owns, the Everett Silvertips, is on its way to the Western Hockey League playoffs and entered the weekend with a chance to win a division championship.
"I never thought we would be in the playoffs," said Yuill, who spent time this week with his longtime friend, former Mariners general manager Pat Gillick. "A division title? Wouldn’t that be something?"
Yuill’s experience in hockey told him that teams don’t make the playoffs or win titles in their first seasons. But he also remembers a moment during preseason training camp that gave him and coach Kevin Constantine an idea that something special could happen.
"When the players got together in the summertime, we asked them to write down how many wins they were going to get," Yuill said. "The average was 30 wins. And then Kevin got to thinking, ‘If you’re going to get 30 wins, why not get a couple more and win the division?’"
Yuill didn’t expect such success, at least on the ice, when the season began. Season-ticket sales were slow and the organization knew it would take some effort and imagination to lure fans who weren’t familiar with hockey, he said.
"That’s why we had to put on a show and give the people a night out," he said. "They had to leave the building and say, ‘Damn, that was fun.’ That’s what we had to do because I had no expectations for what the team would do."
Yuill said he always believed Everett would support the team because the population base was large enough, yet there was a strong sense of community and the Everett Events Center is "a fabulous building for junior hockey."
"But you never really know what the reaction is going to be," he said. "Some towns just never catch on. Every market is special and every market is different."
Yuill said the large crowds that have filled the Everett Events Center in the latter part of the season should allow the club to break even financially. After Friday night’s sellout in the final regular-season home game, the Tips finished with 203,893 fans in 36 dates, an average of 5,664.
"We probably had to have 5,000-plus to break even on the startup year," Yuill said.
That would have been enough for the team to consider 2003-04 a success. What happened on the ice has gone beyond a lot of dreams, including Yuill’s, and created a pleasant dilemma for next season.
"We said to our guys a couple of times, ‘Gee boys, can you slow down a little bit? We’ve got to come back next year,’" Yuill said. "We laugh about that. This is huge, it’s just huge.
"These kids were all castoffs. They were all from other teams, and Kevin got them all pulling together. He’s got a wonderful plan, a great system, and he got results. If you give yourself a fair chance of winning, it’s amazing what can happen."
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
