Dawstar’s role in Hockeyville

Dawstar played a key role in making North Bay the 2007 Hockeyville champions. Chris Dawson, along with Nugget sports editor Ken Pagan produced the 3 minute video submission on behalf of the city. The video called "Pond Hockey Pride," highlights what North Bay does through hockey including the Canadian Pond Hockey Face-Off outreach program and Tom Hedican's Coach 4 Food campaign.

The Pond Hockey Pride Video was chosen in the top 10 by a panel of judges. In the following weeks to come North Bay and its supporters had to use on-line voting as a means to capture the title. North Bay was crowned Kraft Hockeyville 2007 on March 17th when National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman announced live on CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada that North Bay won the 2nd annual national competition beating out Cornwall by more than 13,000 votes.

As part of the prize North Bay won $50,000 in arena upgrades plus the right to host an NHL pre-season game at Memorial Gardens on September 17th when the New York Islanders and Atlanta Thrashers come to the Gateway City. North Bay also won $10,000 in arena upgrades during the Merit prize voting which took place February 5th to February 23rd.

Dawstar Community Spirit

While other communities paid as much as $6,000.00 for production companies to edit a video for the competition, Dawstar did it for free. With all the exposure North Bay captured during the Hockeyville phenomenon that video submission went from being free to becoming priceless.