March 10: Taylor's Ticket Tour - Day 11

Sometimes you need to get out of the office in the winter and talk to the people that really enjoy coming to Canwest Park to get a true sense of how great an evening at the ballpark can be.

That seemed to be the theme on Day 11 of our 2010 Ticket Tour as my new sales assistant, Chelsea Larsen, a student at Red River College who is in for a week of job-shadowing, and I headed down Archibald to Nairn and visited some of the businesses that are, essentially, our neighbours.

It was nice to see people that are busy and ready for a fun-filled baseball season.

We started by visiting the folks at the Habitat for Humanity Store and we also ran into Ron Raap from Premier Printing who had as many good offers for us as we did for him.

Chelsea and I walked over to Regional Products Ltd. and discovered many of the employees enjoy nights at the Goldeyes games. We then walked in on Dennis Delorme and his crew at Praxair on Nairn, a huge company that supplies atmospheric, process and specialty gases. The boys were busy but said they loved a night at the ballpark.

From there we visited Don Sicotte at Metro Centre Ltd., which provides everything from trailers and trailer parts to dock hardware, do-it-yourself aluminum fascia eavestroughs and vinyl siding. Don and his partner Maggie Pearson had a terrific 2009 and he was so busy, he could hardly take a breath, but he did say how much he enjoyed the ballpark and he’d get back to us the second he could sit down.

“I always dreamed of the being the boss and just barking out orders,” he said with a laugh. “Well, I’m the boss, but I’m too busy doing the work to bark orders.”

We then dropped in on Dave Ratte, the branch manager of Cloverdale Industrial Protective Coatings, the industrial division of Cloverdale Paints. Dave was thrilled to see us, probably because he was an old schoolmate of Jamie Betterns, my colour analyst on the Safeway Goldeyes telecasts on Shaw Bettens. Dave is another one of those guys that loves the ballpark and we’ll see often this summer.

From Cloverdale, we walked over to Carpet Girl Inc. and met design consultant James Harris. James is a New Yorker that calls Canwest Park one of his all-time favourite ballparks.

Hope we see all the Carpet Girl employees this summer.

We also met with Robert Lacey at Dufrense Furniture, who loves attending Goldeyes games with his wife, Harold Duncan at United Furniture Warehouse, who was very friendly, and the folks at Quality Life Services Inc. In fact, we met with a woman at Quality Life whose daughter was a fan services rep at Canwest Park last year and who has another daughter ready to join the crew this season.

In total, we put 14 more cards in our draw for that beautifully framed Roman Swiderek print, bringing our total to 125.