Congrats to now former Admirals Assistant Coach Brad Lauer who was just named Assistant Coach of the Ottawa Senators in the NHL. I hope that he does as good a job there as he did for us over two seasons. Best to his family as well. They were a pleasure to get to know.

Since I last weighed in here, and I am overdue to post, we earned a fantastic award as the American Hockey League’s Western Conference Best Fan Experience for the 2008-09 season. This award was given by the League’s management at our annual meeting in Hilton Head, South Carolina a few weeks ago and we are honored to be the first team to win. It’s a validation of our mission to entertain our fans on a nightly basis and a lot of the credit goes to Mike Wojciechowski and Tim Van Wagoner of our staff. They do a fabulous job of running the show every night. We also couldn’t do it without the commitment of our corporate partners who give us the resources to do some really fun things.

We’ll have a newly-designed website coming out during the month of August. We are really excited about what it looks like and we look forward to sharing it with you very soon. We’ve been working with a great local company, Tech By Design, based in Wauwatosa to do this relaunch. They have some really, really creative and talented people there and their work under the guidance of Charlie Larson from our staff is going to put us on the leading edge of technology with the new milwaukeeadmirals.com coming soon.

We will be out at the State Fair again this year with our booth in the Wisconsin Expo Hall as well as at the Pig Races which we’re proud to co-sponsor with Old Wisconsin Sausage and Saz’s. The Fair is such a fun time for us because we get to see so many fans – past, current and future, and talk Admirals Hockey. Plus, keep an eye out for our 2009-10 schedule during the Fair as well.

Go Admirals!