The popular championship round is now only available through a pay per view format, with organizers of the four day tournament having started the PPV process last week during the Junior Girls showcase at the Langley Events Centre.
According to a notice on the AAA tournament website, the reasoning behind the shift from free viewing to pay as you watch, is to cover the hard costs associated with the broadcast of each game such as bandwidth and staffing.
The cost per day for tournament viewing is 7 dollars, or those looking to stream all the tournament action can pay twenty dollars for the tournament pass.
It might prove to be a bit of a gamble for tournament organizers, who have worked hard and with a fair amount of success in recent years to turn the Provincials into a showcase event.
Making the various levels of the British Columbia High School tournaments into something similar to the same kind of excitement level as the NCAA March Madness scene finds in the United States.
For the AAA tournament, the last few years have provided for a few changes, the first was the relocation of the tournament from its long time home in Kamloops to Langley. Now comes another pivot, as the free stream casts of games that kept participating communities in touch with their local teams now only available for purchase.
Considering the buzz that tournament organizers have sought to create through the last few years, the unexpected shift to Pay Per View may in fact reduce some of the commitment from those far away communities, reducing the showcase aspect of the March tournament that the Provincials have been working hard to develop.
The Pay Per view concept seems somewhat short sighted and counter productive to what the tournament was seemingly trying to achieve as the profile of the game continues to grow in B.C.A more forward thinking approach might have been to approach some of the sponsors to the Provincial tournament to cover the cost of streaming the games, providing them with a valuable sponsor mention and making sure that their product line is offered what would have been a fairly large audience base as the tournament continued through the week.
No one will know for sure how the shift to pay to watch will impact on the tournament viewership until after the Provincials have come to an end and tournament organizers review their viewing numbers.
Only then will we know if a tournament that in the past has brought the province together through mid March, in this case fouled out of the game in the last minutes.
Locally there may be viewing opportunities made available through Charles Hays Secondary School, to find out if games will be streamed at the School, follow the CHSS Sports twitter feed for updates.
The Log On page for the Pay Per View portal can be found here.
For more items related to the 2015 AAA and AAAA Provincials see our archive pages below.
AAA Provincial Tournament Results and News
AAAA Provincial Tournament Results and News
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