Hockey Canada announced Thursday that they will be lifting its ban on sanctioned events, leaving the power to their 13 member organizations to decide when it’s safe to return to play.

General Manager of the Saskatchewan Hockey Association, Kelly McClintock says that while it was an easy decision to cancel hockey across the country on March 12, reopening is not going to be as uniform as they once thought.

“Saskatchewan and Manitoba are doing really well, P.E.I.’s doing really well, Quebec isn’t doing well in certain areas, so it doesn’t make sense to hold one province captive over the rest, I think it was a good decision,” said McClintock. “Now it’s up to us to make sure that we have healthy arenas and healthy guidelines for people to start playing again.”

As part of the Re-Open Saskatchewan Plan, hockey arenas aren’t allowed to reopen until Phase 4. Health guidelines and precautions for indoor sporting facilities have not been outlined yet.

Even when hockey is allowed to restart, McClintock says it’s going to look a whole lot different.

“I think that you’re going to see, for this year, a real change,” said McClintock. “Tournaments are going to take a whole different look, maybe there won’t be as many tournaments, there’ll probably be restrictions on travel between provinces. I think the key is that we get to play hockey, but tournaments might be a little bit of a different situation.”

Despite the uncertainty around next season and COVID-19 in general, McClintock says that the SHA doesn’t believe there will be a drop in registration.

“People are looking for activities to put their kids in, they don’t see registration dropping at all,” said McClintock. “I think that, certainly, there’s going to be some parents that are weary, and they want to see what kind of guidelines are in place, they probably want to see what the structure of the game is going to look like, but the feedback from our membership is, no, they don’t see that there will be a big drop at all.”

McClintock says that while, obviously, an ideal situation for hockey post-pandemic is going back to the way it was before, health guidelines are important and, probably, here to stay.