The Halifax Thunderbirds franchise was created in 2019 in the National Lacrosse League.
However, the team has a longer history than that due to some complex changes in ownership. The story is intertwined with the Rochester Knighthawks.
This article untangles a complicated web.
Who Owns The Halifax Thunderbirds In The NLL?
The Halifax Thunderbirds franchise is owned by Curt Styres who moved a lacrosse team to Halifax in 2019. Styres is a Mohawk businessman based in Ohsweken in the Six Nations reserve in Canada.
He is a minority owner of Grand River Enterprises, Canada’s fourth largest cigarette manufacturer.
Many sports fans worry about whether franchise owners have deep enough pockets to support a team. Or that their business dealings will go south and take all the other operations down too.
As this event actually happened in the circumstances that led to the creation of the Thunderbirds, let’s take a deeper dive into Curt Styres’ background.
Curt Styres, Owner
Curt Styres grew up in Ohsweken, a rural town on the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve about an hour from Toronto.
He ran track and played lacrosse at school. His father died young, so Curt and his brother worked jobs outside school to help their mother. They opened a tire shop as teenagers which they grew into a car repair shop.
Styres took up welding in trade school and went on to be an ironworker. His work took him across North America.
Business background
His first major business deal was in 1991 when he joined with five business partners to co-found a tobacco company on the reserve.
Grand River Enterprises has a factory in Ohsweken that employs hundreds of local people. The company has a second factory in Germany that supplies cigarettes to the German army.
GRE’s sales grew from about $200m in 2004 to over a billion dollars in 2014.
Styres has a minority stake in the company and he discloses very little about his personal wealth. However, court proceedings in 2017 revealed the significant wealth of a larger stakeholder.
Ken Hill was described in the Toronto Sun as a tobacco king and billionaire. His car collection alone was valued at $5.8m.
Sports ownership
Curt is involved in several sports. He and his brother Glenn opened speedway in Ohsweken for dirt-track racing.
Glenn is a champion driver himself. As part of their marketing, Glen promised to roll his car at events if there wasn’t a rollover on race night.
In 2002, Curt bought a stake in a junior lacrosse team in the Six Nations reserve. He built the Iroquois Lacrosse Arena in Ohsweken to support them.
After several years, Styres wanted to get involved in professional lacrosse. His opportunity arose in 2008.
Buying the Rochester Knighthawks
Curt Styres purchased a majority stake in what was then the Rochester Knighthawks. He paid $5.75m to Steve Donner to buy sixty percent of the shareholding.
Styres was fully committed to the lacrosse franchise. He let go of the team’s general manager and took on the role himself in 2009.
When owners try to run their sports franchise, it’s usually a disaster. But that wasn’t the case here. Styres steer the team in the right direction and there was plenty of success to come.
Selling the Knightshawks name
As the years went by, Styres was increasingly keen to form a lacrosse franchise in Canada.
The NLL agreed to an expansion franchise in Halifax. But the organization didn’t want the great supporter base in Rochester to lose a team. At this point, a complex dance occurred.
Styres sold the naming rights and intellectual property to the billionaire Terrance Pegula. This meant that they could start a new franchise in Rochester but use the existing name.
You can read more in our article on the current owner of the Rochester Knighthawks.
But when Styres created his new franchise in Halifax, he wasn’t starting with a clean slate. He took most of the Knighthawks roster north!
Steve Donner, Prior Owner
Steve Donner has a long history with what is now the NLL. The league grew out of an older incarnation called the Major Indoor Lacrosse League (MILL).
Donner was one of the founders of the Buffalo Bandits in the MILL back in 1992.
Twelve years later, he bought a franchise expansion for Rochester from the NLL. Donner already had minority stakes in a field lacrosse team (the Rattlers) and a soccer team (the Rhinos).
He named the new NLL team the Rochester Knighthawks.
Financial troubles
I mentioned earlier that sports fans worry about franchise owners running into business difficulties.
Memories of Donner’s experiences don’t help!
The businessman ran into financial difficulties in 2005. He and some business partners had entered into a public-private joint venture to build a new stadium in the city.
There’s no doubt but that the city council was slow to release their part of the funds.
To cut a long and complicated story short, Donner and his business partners took out a loan to keep construction going.
The private investors eventually couldn’t pay both the loan and monies owed to other private contractors. The issues grew so large that the city mayor told him to relinquish his ownership of his sports teams.
Donner put up his stakes for sale, and Curt Styres purchased majority ownership of the Rochester Knighthawks.
If you want to read more about this, there’s a good “both sides” write-up here.
Despite the controversy of those times, Curt Styres is fulsome in praise for his predecessor as owner. He pays tribute to how Donner built the lacrosse franchise in Rochester.
A lot of things went sideways, but he was a soldier for sure who fought through a lot of things just to keep everything going.
Styres on Donner
