Red Deer will be home to the second annual Premier Card & Collectibles Convention in less than two weeks.
From Sept. 13-15 the event will be held at the Parkland Pavilion in Westerner Park and is hosted by local business owners Jessica and Vigil Holmes.
Together the couple has owned Holmestead Sports Cards & Collectibles in Red Deer since 2020.
Jessica explained that their decision to create the event last year had to do with a need they saw for it in the community.
"We attended a similar event in Edmonton and thought why not give it a whirl and see," she said.
"We jumped right in and had some great response from the community. Being able to offer something like that in Red Deer is something we thought would be successful for us. Red Deer lots of times can get overlooked because they may rather do it in Edmonton or Calgary."
The three-day event will feature approximately 75 vendors looking to sell sports cards and memorabilia such as jerseys but also plenty of other things like Pokemon cards, comics, and other items.
The goal of the event was to create an affordable experience for families who can't travel to Edmonton or Calgary for these types of events. Children under 12 years old will get in for free and for everyone else, it will be $10 for admission or $25 for all three days.
"The [sports card market] took a pretty fierce beating in the 1990s. Lots of the market was flooded with product, they were a bit overproduced, and so it died down," she said.
"It took a major resurgence through the COVID-19 pandemic and essentially what happened were people cleaned out their basements and took it up as a hobby."
The event will also feature plenty of recognizable faces within the sports world including a hot stove panel interview with Calgary Flames alumni on Saturday, Sept. 14, from 2-4 p.m. The panel will feature Dana Murzyn, Colin Patterson, and Jamie Macoun who all won the Stanley Cup with the Flames in 1989. That same day they'll also be accepting donations for the Red Deer Food Bank.
On Sunday they'll also host Ryan Straschnitzki who is a survivor of the Humboldt Broncos tragedy in 2018 and is the founder of the Straz Strong Foundation. He'll be delivering a keynote speech from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. to tell his story.
There will also be several local athletes that day who will speak on accessibility in sports including local athletes including Jason Lunn and Ray Wasdal of the Team Jigger Foundation, Jeff Dow of the Red Deer Reapers wheelchair rugby team, and Carlos Pardo formerly of the Calgary Seeing Ice Dogs.
