Bombers vow to improve stadium experience

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/08/2021 (1495 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Blue Bombers fans can rest assured the football club will iron out the kinks of the stadium experience before the team plays next week.

Thursday night, during the first game of the season, fans waited in long lineups for food and drinks and there was a lack of grub. Cash wasn’t accepted as payment but there was a lack of staff to serve the long lineups of fans who had to make contactless payments. People complained on social media that the excitement of attending Canada’s largest sporting event since the pandemic began was dulled by the inconveniences.

The issues will be smoothed out before the next Bombers game, the team’s president said Friday.

“There were little hiccups along the way, of course, but for not working for 19 months and re-energizing the stadium, it went very well,” Wade Miller said.

Regardless of changes to public health orders that take effect Saturday, masks will continue to be required in indoor areas of the stadium, cash will not be accepted, and all attendees will have to prove they’ve been fully immunized.

“We won’t be changing anything that we’ve done. It was an extremely positive night for Manitoba,” Miller said.

Bombers fan Alex Howe drove in from Morden with his wife and son to catch the game in person. He noted he had spent at least 30 minutes in line for food, had witnessed some people not wearing masks while indoors and was surprised he wasn’t asked for his I.D. after presenting his immunization QR code, despite that being part of stadium protocol.

He said those were minor concerns compared with the experience of going to a big sporting event.

“It’s kind of funny. On the one hand, it was annoying that it was taking so long, but it was also like, ‘Ah, yes, it’s this is what it’s like, it’s normal again,’ you know?” he said.

He wasn’t nervous around being in a packed venue because the requirement that everyone be fully vaccinated “added peace of mind.”

He said he looks forward to attending more games.

“So for being the first big event in the province, I thought things went very, very smoothly,” he said.

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: malakabas_

Malak Abas
Reporter

Malak Abas is a city reporter at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg’s North End, she led the campus paper at the University of Manitoba before joining the Free Press in 2020. Read more about Malak.

Every piece of reporting Malak produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.