Riderville.com
It is week one for new President and CEO of the Saskatchewan Roughriders, Craig Reynolds. Even with the whirlwind of activity surrounding his first week, Craig had a few seconds to answer some questions from the Riderville.com staff.
Well Craig, it’s week one of the job, does it feel like you are the President and CEO of the Roughriders?
“Yah, I think it does in many ways. It’s something when I got named in December that March 1st felt like a long time away but it really came quite quickly. Between then and now, I have had a lot of time with Jim (Hopson) to work on transition items so I was getting more and more prepared to take over the role. When the day is finally here, you are excited and that is the way I feel.”
How has the transition been like?
“It’s been great! Jim’s been very open with helping me with some of the things that I had questions specific to the role, and help me understand how to approach certain things. Certainly we spent some time last week in Florida with the Board of Governors meetings so we were really dealing with CFL matters and that was a little bit new to me certainly at that level so that was really helpful. We spent a lot of time travelling down there actually where we spent a lot of time talking about the transition, talking a little about the next month. Jim’s around, so the transition will be ongoing until the end of March and thankfully Jim isn’t going anywhere so he will still be available if I need to reach out. I’m pretty excited about taking over the reins.”
What are the main things you want to focus on in the beginning of your tenure as President?
“There are three major priorities for us and they are all new stadium related. The first is obviously to continue to participate and contribute with our partners, the City and the Province and Evraz Place related to the design and construction of the new stadium. So we still need input on that. We are designing our own space and we have 67-thousand square feet of space that we need to design and outfit and we are continuing to make progress on that on the design side and soon we will move into the construction stage on that.
There’s the capital fund raising that goes along with that and the pretty big capital commitments upcoming. We’ve been doing a lot of planning on our capital campaign and capital fundraising, but we need to move to execution mode very quickly.
Lastly, there is our ticket holder transition so we’ve got to move our large season ticket base over from old Mosaic Stadium to new Mosaic Stadium so we really need to make some progress on that which will start with some communication to our fans which will be on-going. So those are the three big priorities that are near term.”
Even though this is the first week of officially being the President of the Riders, have you already had your first “Presidential” moment?
“It was real when I walked into the press conference to be honest with you, it didn’t feel real until that moment. Obviously I knew I was going to be named and started gathering my thoughts for the press conference and when I walked in there, sat down at that table and Wayne (Morsky) was right next to me and they started firing questions, it was my really, this is wow, this is real moment, I am going to be in charge here shortly and I’m going to be the President and CEO of the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Seeing the backdrop behind me too and seeing the press clippings after, that was my presidential moment.”
With this new role, are you even more excited to get the season started?
“Oh absolutely! I’m always excited and everyone in our organization is always excited and that’s what makes it great working for the Saskatchewan Roughrider Football Club. I am so excited about the season, I’m so excited about what we have done in the off-season, I’m excited about our coaching staff, and I’m excited for the moves Brendan (Taman) and Jeremy (O’Day) have been making. I just want to get going and normally I want to get going, but there is a lot of planning that needs to happen in the off-season and that planning continues. It’s just different with the role I have going forward, you just really looking forward to playing some games.”
