On Saturday afternoon I received an email from Denver Spurs GM Richard Poelker to let me know that Dave Atkinson has passed away after a bout with cancer.
There will be a lot of people in the CCHL that don't understand who Dave was, and why he was important to the CCHL - even though, to my knowledge, he was never a part of the league.
To begin, let's take a look back as to how Dave Atkinson became the "ABPA guru" for the last twenty years out of pure necessity and a love of simulated hockey.
About two decades ago, the DOS-based simulator program's manufacturers announced that they would no longer put together an annual disk for each NHL season. It looked like the end of the APBA hockey simulator as we knew it. There wasn't another simulator on the market at that time that quite did the trick and provided the same level of realism that APBA did. Realizing this, and having worked for the parent APBA company Dave stepped to the forefront to ensure that APBA disks would continue on for the next two decades.
He started a yahoo email group with APBA stakeholders and began crafting a disk to represent each NHL season. Over the years, the process became more refined and defined, to the point where each year there was a site dedicated to doing voting of comparables between players that would garner 100,000 votes annually for Dave to craft the disk from.
The CCHL used APBA for the first 16 or 17 years of our existence, but as time moves on, it was time to evolve to the Simon T simulator three years ago.
Looking back at it, there were a few reasons to make the transition at the time. The first was that APBA was still relatively giving us results from an older style of play and did not have the shootout. It always weighed shooting percentage far too heavy and could lead to some crazy numbers on guys that didn't play a lot but scored on 35% of their shots in their 11 games.
We saw the Simon T simulator as a way to change towards the future with the shootout and new rules of the National Hockey League being incorporated into gameplay. The other aspect was that there were multiple rating disks available for us to use - we weren't limited to just one group should that group cease to exist. Simply put, as much as we loved APBA, it was time to adapt.
Without Dave though, the CCHL would have likely folded many years ago before Simon T's sim was a reality because there just wouldn't have been an APBA disk annually without his leadership and tireless work for the APBA community.
A year ago, Dave hosted online seminars for a number of people that wanted to know more about what made the APBA simulator tick and how to generate ratings/the disk annually.
Even though the CCHL had moved past it, I attended one of the sessions because, for 20 years, the APBA simulator was all I had known so I wanted to know more.
It was interesting to see the inner workings of the process, but it also gave Dave and myself a chance to discuss the Simon T simulator and led to a lot of conversation between us in terms of the comparison. He was super interested in learning more about it and we wanted to set up a night to go through it via zoom.
Sadly, our schedules never allowed for that to happen and it's not going to happen now.
I should have known something was up. It's May and we haven't even heard anything about a new APBA disk creation process despite the NHL coming to a close for the regular season. Honestly, I never gave it much thought this year and figured it would happen in the summer. I was wrong. Dave unfortunately had much more to deal with that the community did not know about.
I would love to find a way to name a league award after Dave. Even though he was not a part of our league, the CCHL likely doesn't continue on past the early years without his work on the disk with the team annually. l
While I never got to meet the man personally, Dave's presence for the computer hockey sim world really can't be forgotten. Even if you didn't know who he was until today, he was a big part of our lives.
Thank you Dave and may you rest in peace.
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