Edmonton Thistles—Hockey's Country Club

Organized hockey games were recorded in Calgary back in 1893; a year later, the Edmonton Thistles played their first recorded game.

Hockey, like soccer and cricket clubs of the era, was based very heavily along ethnic and class lines. Being part of the Thistles was no different than being a member of a posh country club; each of the players were considered part of the socially elite, with British backgrounds and breeding, in the new frontier city.

On Christmas Day, 1894, the Thistles played their first recorded game against a team of Fort Saskatchewan police officers. Each team played a seven-players-per-side game with no substitutions at the old Thistle Rink, which was located in present-day downtown Edmonton. The Thistles beat the Fort club by a score of 3-2 and even though membership on the team was limited to seven men, the club quickly gained recognition throughout the city as one of the major new institutions in the city. Throughout the remaining years of the 19th century, crowds grew year by year to watch the club play—and a series of exhibition games against opposition from Calgary became major events on Edmonton’s sporting calendar.

The team’s biggest benefactor was builder and fur trader Richard Secord, the great grand-nephew of Laura Secord, the famous heroine of the War of 1812. Born in Ontario, Secord moved west to seek his fortune. He was elected  Conservative MLA for the Northwest Territories in 1902, three years before Alberta was proclaimed a province. Not only were his efforts in the territorial assembly a major reason that Edmonton was incorporated in 1904, but he acted as a chief financier for the new Thistle Rink, located at 102 Street and 102 Avenue. The new rink would give the Thistles a new home, with a playing surface 54 metres long (6 metres shorter than the current NHL rink length). At this time, there was still no standard set for the size of a regulation hockey rink, and the Thistles had actually played games on rink just 30 metres long, just half the size of the modern hockey rink!

The new Thistle Rink pushed hockey into the mainstream of Edmonton social life; the Thistles had set the stage for the great teams that would follow, from the Eskimos and the Flyers to the Edmonton Oilers.

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