By Alexander Baker
Anyone remember the Ottawa Renegades?
How about the Ottawa Rebel?
Or maybe the Ottawa Lynx?
It is particularly sad that very few people in Ottawa know anything about the Lynx – the city’s Triple-A baseball team the past 13 years.
Fans even set an International League attendance record in 1993, the team’s inaugural season, when it was the Montreal Expos farm club.
Since then, the Expos moved to Washington, D.C., the Lynx’s affiliation changed to the Baltimore Orioles and they now average a mere 2,335 fans per game in their 10,332-seat stadium.
The team’s future in Ottawa has been almost a decade-long saga. It seems certain the Lynx will move to Allentown, Pennsylvania, after the upcoming season.
The Lynx’s slide into irrelevance illustrates the plight of professional sports teams in the nation’s capital.
Two CFL teams, a lacrosse team, even a roller-hockey team have all folded in the last decade.
First it was the Ottawa Roughriders franchise that, despite its 120-year-history, folded in 1996 because of incompetent ownership and decreased fan interest.
Just four years later Ottawa got another chance when the Renegades club joined the league, but it too was gone after only five seasons. A dismal attendance record in 2006 helped, when the ‘Gades averaged more than 5,000 fewer fans than the next lowest team in the CFL.
The Ottawa Rebel, which played in the National Lacrosse League, lasted just four seasons despite the fact lacrosse is Canada’s official sport. Nobody has ever heard of the Ottawa Loggers, a ball-hockey club that lasted only two seasons.
Even the Ottawa Senators, the city’s great professional sports success, has the lowest season ticket base of any Canadian NHL team. Until owner Eugene Melnyk came to the Sens’ rescue, buying the team from the financially struggling Rod Bryden in 2003, their future in Ottawa was as uncertain as the Lynx.
However, these professional failures are hiding Ottawa’s true nature: the city is a thriving hub of amateur sport.
With the recent award of the 2008 Ontario Summer Games, coming back to Ottawa after the success of the 2006 games, Mayor Larry O’Brien has signaled his willingness to spend money on sports infrastructure in the city and put it on the “sports town” map.
In fact, when it comes to hosting amateur championships, Ottawa will be hard-pressed to accommodate anything else.
Besides the Ontario Summer Games, in 2006 Ottawa also played host to the Canadian Figure Skating Championships.
This year, the FIFA Under-20 World Cup, the Canadian CanoeKayak Championships and Cross Country Canada’s Eastern Canadian Championships will all be held in the Ottawa-Gatineau area.
Next year, the men’s university basketball championship moves to Ottawa for a three-year term after more than two decades in Halifax, along with the return of the Ontario Summer Games.
In 2009, hockey fans in Ottawa can again look forward to an international tournament, the World Junior Championships. And then there is the city’s annual Bell Capital Cup – the largest minor hockey tournament in the world.
If the mayor follows through on his musings, Ottawa should have even more soccer fields, baseball diamonds, basketball courts, and shiny, renovated community centres for athletes to use in the future.
The moral of the story is, amateur sports in Ottawa are flourishing; athletes and sports enthusiasts in the nation’s capital have never had more places to play or sporting options to choose from.
Just don’t tell that to the Ottawa Lynx.