Canucks Superskills Could Inspire Whitecaps Open Day

We’ve mentioned it before in the blog, but one thing we’d like to see the Whitecaps do is to have some kind of open day.

We’d love the Caps to open up Empire and have the fans in, not just for a nose around but for an afternoon of festivities. With the season fast approaching, this is now unlikely to be able to take place before March 19th but they could, and should, fit in an open day sometime soon.

I’ve been to a few at East Fife over the years and they were always great fun and gave you the chance to hang out with the managers, the players and your fellow fans. Sometimes special activities and events were put on at them, other times just tours of the ground and Q & A sessions. It just helps make the fans feel closer to the Club.

One thing which I love here is the Vancouver Canucks Superskills event. I’ve been every year since I moved over and was there enjoying it yesterday. I could do without there being all those noisy kids there, but it’s always an entertaining afternoon!!

Sitting in Rogers Arena yesterday though got me thinking to what kind of similar event the Whitecaps could put on. There’s definitely some exciting possibilities that I’d love them to consider.

For those who don’t know, the Canucks Superskills is a chance for the players to relax and have some healthy inter-team competition in front of the fans. The afternoon consists of seven events: a 3 on 3 game; hardest shot; fastest player; accuracy shooting; puck control; breakaway relay; and a powerplay game.

Each event brings it’s own entertainment to the fans and competitiveness amongst the players.

Could such an event become a regular fixture for the Whitecaps players and fans? Hell yeah! So what could it look like? Well we gave it some thought and came up with the following…

We don’t want to follow the hockey activities too much but there’s certainly some variances we can put on some of those events to give them a football flavour, whilst also adding in some exclusively football ones into the mix at the same time.

Fastest Player we would keep. Set up either a 100m dash or some kind of obstacle course and see what the players can show us. Accuracy too would be an interesting one to see. Get a structure with spaces in it or with target to hit and see how many shots it takes the players to hit all the targets. You could also have longest throw and longest goal kick. Maybe Wes and Jay have rivals!

Skills wise, we could have a keepie-uppie competition. Who can do the most in a minute or 30 seconds or something like that. A free kick competition could take place where the selected players have to see how many balls they can curl round or over the wall and into the net with an allotted amount of balls. A smaller net could be used or make it even harder and have a goalie.

With team, and not just individual, events making up the Superskills, we could also see a Soccer AM style crossbar challenge and headers and volleys match up. An elimination ‘world cup willie’ style scoring game could also be part of it.

Ok, some of these might need a little work and I’m just throwing things out there for now, but the basis is at least there! One downside of such an event may be hosting it in a stadium like Empire or BC Place. At Rogers Arena, you feel close to the action. At the outdoor stadiums, not so much. Limit the numbers and only use half the ground or have pitch seating and you may negate that problem.

The Canucks Superskills event raises money for the Canucks For Kids Fund. A similar Whitecaps event could raise money for the Whitecaps Foundation. The Canucks always precede their Superskills event with an alumni match. The Caps could do something similar. Even better though would be to have a game between some Caps alumni and some supporters. The fans could pay money to take part in the game, with all proceeds going to the Whitecaps Foundation.

We think we could make such an event work. Would you be up for it? Would you attend? Let us know your thoughts below and also any ideas you think could fit into such an open day.

Let’s make this happen!