New Score Clock Arrives
Andy Beesley, Cougars vice president, business, stands before the partially assembled score clock Thursday – photos 250News
Prince George, B.C. – Like a kid on Christmas morning, work crews are busy assembling the newly purchased score clock at CN Centre this week.
“It feels like Christmas morning when you’ve bought your kid the most complicated toy on Earth and now you have to assemble it and you’re scratching your head saying why did we do this?” quips Andy Beesley, the Cougars vice president, business.
“There’s a crew that’s been hired to put this together, it’s a very sophisticated, state-of-the-art system so there’s an entire crew that’s flown in from the Lower Mainland, even Portland and other parts of Canada.”
He says the plan is to have the clock assembled and functional this weekend before the second layer of work begins next week.
“Where we have to program in every little thing that you see on the screen. Every graphic, every picture, every special effect. We have to custom make it and put it into the system.
He says the team anticipates the clock will be ready for the home opener a week tonight versus Kelowna.
“And as the season progresses we’ll continue to add elements and make it more and more entertaining for the fans.”
The City of Prince George’s share of the cost for the clock is $546,000 while the Cougars are paying for all the bells and whistles. Beesley says the final price tag comes in at around three-quarters of a million dollars.
He says it’s worth it though.
“Well the reality was the old score clock was more or less dead. So this provides something that fans in this modern day of sports entertainment, have come to expect.
“They want a first class show. It’s going to be like watching a giant TV and being able to watch the replays. We’ve built in additional camera angles for replays of goals. We also have a much more sophisticated ability to get close-ups of dancing kids and people having fun in the stands.”
Comments
Could have fed a lot of hungry kids with half a million dollars.
Your tax dollars already do. I bet your personal residence could accomodate 5 homeless people from downtown, so why don’t you hop on that agenda as well, while you are feeding the hungry?
Oh right, you are a fool that just spouts out negativity at every turn. You really don’t care about the homeless, or the hungry, you care about being a putz at every turn.
Awww…Does the poor little hockey fan not like it when someone suggests our money could be better spent elsewhere? You must be pretty tired from constantly holding your hand out.
The clock isn’t just for hockey, it’s used in all events.. but you would know that if you ever left your mother’s basement. The clock is a revenue generator for anything in CN Center.
Revenues for the CN centre in 2015 were about 1.5 million. Expenditures were about 2.1 million.
“Revenue generator” and “CN Centre” don’t belong in the same sentence.
I like the CN Centre, I watch a dozen Cougars games a year and I have even left my mom’s basement for some other events. I don’t think the City should be subsidizing it, raise the ticket prices and let the users pay for it.
Seems to me that the price of the first clock was around $800,000.00 and it was not that long ago.
This time around the Cities portion of the cost is $546,000.00. This is a lot of money to put into a clock, and to see replays.
In any event if we don’t get a huge increase in fans, we will never be able to pay for this clock from the Cities revenue from the Cougars.
Just another bunch of free loaders. Guess the $800,000.00 job was not good enough.
Cheers
Retired 02, how is that taxpayer subsidized white elephant of an arena in Abbotsford doing? You should probably worry more about that than about what’s going on way up here in PG!
Wow, tough day at work but I would personally like to thank axman and leroy – you guys literally made my day :-) I’m grinning ear to ear!
Comments for this article are closed.