Navigating an ongoing pandemic hasn’t been easy for anyone.

In the context of the sports world, ECHL Commissioner Ryan Crelin has had his hands full. Overseeing a 27-team league with teams in both the United States and Canada, as many restrictions and protocols have returned, has proven to be a big challenge, but one that Crelin has been willing to take head-on. So far, he has successfully steered the league through the perils of the Omicron variant.

“It’s a huge challenge, and you can’t script some of this stuff,” Crelin told FloHockey in a one-on-one phone conversation.

“You make your best attempt to plan and figure things out, but you’ve got to play the cards you’re dealt, and you never know where the next card is coming from. So, it’s a massive challenge. We’ve got a general gameplan, and then we wait to see what happens. We’ve worked very closely with the PHPA on our ‘return to play’ protocols and we’ve followed the CDC guidelines, and we adapt accordingly.”

Just like last season the league has had to remain flexible in order to continue moving forward. Last year the ECHL season began with just 13 teams due to opt-outs, then a 14th team, the eventual Kelly Cup Champion Fort Wayne Komets, joined play in an unprecedented move.

“We started out just like we wanted to, with all teams in for this season and some really strong attendance numbers that we saw, a bounce-back really across the board,” Crelin says.

“We’ve been very encouraged by that. Unfortunately, as we’ve gotten a little deeper into winter, some of the jurisdictions here, notably in Canada, have forced us to postpone some games and do some rescheduling, so we’re working through that… Our goal is to put on a season, get to the playoffs and serve as entertainment and quality hockey for our fans.”

As Crelin noted, that has been a particular challenge up north. The league has two Canadian teams, and both the Newfoundland Growlers and the expansion Trois-Rivieres Lions have recently seen games postponed.

“It’s probably our biggest focus right now, the inability to have fans (in Canada),” he says. “There’s some quarantine and border restrictions as well. But we’ve pulled together and worked with the other teams that those teams were playing to amend the schedule to the best of our ability. It’s a big focus for us, and we look at the facts that they lay out, and unfortunately those change, quite honestly, day-to-day sometimes. We plan and adjust accordingly.”

That’s seemingly been the motto for the ECHL this season both off and on the ice, and the impact that decisions made at the top two levels of the game have had in the ECHL cannot be understated. In a year in which many teams struggled in the offseason to put together rosters, the implementation of the National Hockey League’s taxi squad—which, in short, largely promoted American Hockey League players to the NHL, necessitating the need for AHL teams to call up ECHL players and thus further decimate those groups—has added another unique challenge to pull from an already shallow player pool.

The NHL will now utilize the previously built-in Olympic break window to play rescheduled games, while the AHL recently added another week onto their regular season for similar purposes. Both of those leagues have made significant schedule adjustments, but Crelin says he doesn’t anticipate having to take similar actions just yet, having been able to adequately adjust the schedule and keep the on-ice product as good as it can be with everything that’s going on above them.

“We knew this year would be different compared to last year, in which there was a much bigger player pool with less teams playing and issues with international travel,” Crelin says.

“When you try and find some silver linings in things, we’ve also had some really unique stories come out of it; some retired guys came back and were able to score goals and give pucks to their kids who weren’t alive when they retired, we had a 19-year-old emergency goaltender win a game, we had some SPHL call-ups. These people wouldn’t have had that opportunity otherwise. I’m not certain you would script that, or necessarily wish it, but it’s pretty cool to see it come to fruition.”

On the flip side of that, the ECHL has seen a spike in alumni making their debuts at the National Hockey League level, with eight players moving up to game’s highest level in the last ten days alone, as well as a big jump in players getting their first opportunities in the American Hockey League. Over the years more than 700 ECHL alumni have made it to the NHL level.

“We pride ourselves in being a developmental league, and it’s really being showcased right now,” Crelin says. “Again, I’m not certain this is the way we would have scripted it, but it’s really come to the forefront here. That’s who we are in hockey’s development landscape.”

For those still in the ECHL, a big opportunity to be seen on a national stage and perhaps one day join those groups of call-ups presents itself shortly with the return of the league’s All-Star Game—which was set to be held in Jacksonville last year before it was ultimately canceled. The Icemen finally get their opportunity to host this year, and will field their team against a team made up of the league’s best. 

“Looking forward to that this year, and we’ll have our challenges and things won’t be 100 percent in terms of a normal All-Star Game with keeping our COVID protocols and reducing player interactions,” Crelin says. “But, it’s our mid-season showcase, and we want to be able to put those festivities on for the fans.”

As the game eventually ends up in the rear-view mirror though, the focus for the league will remain on trying to return to some sense of normalcy, completing a second half of the season and ultimately marching towards the Kelly Cup Playoffs, which will once again be shown exclusively on FloHockey.

“That marks the halfway point, and I do think we’re going to start to see things start to normalize,” Crelin says. “Nobody has a crystal ball, but looking at the history of last year and the general sense of the medical community, this is a bump in the road, we’ve got to work through it. It won’t be perfect, but I see things improving as we come down the stretch here, and that’s the most exciting time in all of hockey as we build towards the playoffs and see those competitive races.”