Rest assured - when I win the Lottery, I’m buying the owners out (will give you a good price guys, so don’t worry).
Were bringing back:-
1. Passionate physical fast hockey.
2. An intimidating intro & pregame build-up.
3. Giving the entire place a proper revamp.
4. Appointing Kev to run the bar and decorate it like a hockey bar.
5. The old Pizza guy from outside the BBT.
6. A proper food outlet in the rink.
7. A decent selection of beers.
8. Player / fan interaction events.
9. More open training sessions.
10. Competitions to bring the fans closer into the club.
11. Fan suggestion boxes - that are discussed, voted on and implemented.
12. The old logo (fans to vote on the original or the previous one).
13. Fan competition to design the jersey each season.
14. Bringing the Junior Devils formally under the Devils umbrella with a joined up coaching approach.
15. Launching the Cardiff Devils NIHL team that will offer a pathway for promising young Brits to advance.
16. Pad 2 reinstated in all its glory.
17. Recognising The Inferno and making an effort to integrate it with the club.
I know
@James has replied to this already, but just to add something extra to #17...
The system is still there, we haven't changed that side of the website so if the club allowed us to/wanted us to we could run Q&As all over again and we'd be happy to, but that situation doesn't exist at the moment.
@SteveKing has always been happy to speak to us, he's never dodged a question we've sent him and his answers have wracked up thousands and thousands of views. We've now run 4 written Q&As with steve, previous to that the only owner that replied to us about doing one was Ragan during probably some of the worst times for the club. We took some flak for even running that one.
But also, i'm not sure The Inferno should be integrated with the club, Phillips threatened us with lawsuits when he didn't like what was posted, Burge tried to buy us out, Ragan had some interesting views and as for the current group, they've been open and as already mentioned, they need to take some time before replying in general on the forum because of the hat they wear. But remaining independant is probably for the best, although letting us speak to the players again would be a nice thing
As it stands, the archive of Q&As that we undertook can be found
HERE but you can see how many we used to do during the offseason, and I genuinely think they were a good thing. We got to ask some different questions, we got a bit of the players personalities thrown in and as a massive bonus, we had content the club could and did use for their programmes during the season! Win win!
But as it stands, Steve has said he is open to speaking to us again, not sure about Francis and TK has never replied, but he has done a recorded thing with AVFTB so maybe it's because we wanted to stick with written, or it's just that we're a useful thing to take a shot at every so often to distract from something else going on.
One final thing to try and keep this thread on topic, someone mentioned about a team without winners onboard and one of the responses we had from Neil Francis back in offseason 2016 might add to that:
The Inferno - We've had a fairly high turnover of players this off-season with 5 retirements and some movement to other clubs. It feels like some of the new players coming in have a lot of leadership and winning mentality, was this a recruitment objective or has it just worked out that way?
Neil Francis - Experience and winning mentality was definitely something we were looking to add this year. We've recently been a pretty young team full of potential but clearly we didn't get across the line last year when our potential had put us in the driving seat. That was so frustrating for the owners, management, fans and players that we felt we needed to add a few guys who have been used to winning championships and will hopefully take the games by the scruff of the neck at the business end of the season.
I'm convinced the club aren't actively trying to avoid recruiting winners, but it does feel that maybe the recruitment side of things isn't quite what it was in years gone by?
Bit of a ramble there, so the TLDR version is; We'd be happy to speak to whoever, whenever again