New Rink?

The town hall meetings seemed to have created a lot of positive thinking in the hockey community.

The series of meetings hosted by Sport North Bay have allowed many hockey people in the city to throw around some new ideas and one of the most unique and intriguing concepts is the idea of building a hybrid outdoor arena with a roof and an ice surface that would be stay chilled by running off an existing ice rink.

The cities arena manager believes its something they might want to look at in the near future.

“Obviously people would like to look towards either a practice ice surface that was either outdoors or have the capacity to be hooked onto another rink or arena that maybe doesn’t require the seating capacity of a regular rink, and they are really great ideas and they are something that deserves to be looked at,” arena manager Cathy Seguin said.

The cities best option for this unique concept would be to build another rink by the double rinks at Pete Palangio arena. The ice plant there is one of the best in the province and would be able to accommodate another ice surface during the winter months.

“There are some opportunities with our arena facilities, this one in particular (Pete Palangio) that may be able to work with an additional ice surface but those are all subject to budget discussions and further I guess community support showing us that there is a need for that kind of thing to happen within this community and there would be a demand for that ice use.” Seguin said.

A cool idea that would allow more teams to stay in town for their ice time.