Where will all the skaters go? That’s the tricky question the City of Thorold is trying to sort out, after deciding not to install ice at the James Whyte Arena next season.
All activities at the Whyte Arena will move to the newly built Canada Games Park, which will be shared by Brock University, St. Catharines, and Thorold. However, Thorold user groups, such as hockey teams and figure skaters, will not have their usual time slots.
The Whyte Arena sees about 50 hours of use during prime-time hours every week, and while the Canada Games facility will be able to match the same amount of hours, only 32 of those will align with the current utilization.
“An example of that would be the Friday night ice,” said city hall staff member Stephanie Jarvis, while giving a presentation at Wednesday’s meeting of the Parks, Trails, and Recreation Committee. “There is only about one hour available in the new arena to us on Friday nights and currently we have two partner groups who use about on average four hours of ice. So we need to come up with a plan on how we are going to transition.”
That means that the city needs to rethink its ice allocation strategy, rearranging time slots between the Frank Doherty Arena and Summer Games Park, depending on the needs of its user groups and the time slots provided by the Canada Games facility.
“It’s really going to be the partner groups and the seasonal clients that are most affected by this transition,” said Jarvis. “The partner groups being mostly minor hockey and figure skating, and then there’s also seasonal clients: our men’s league, Junior B’s, those types of groups.”
What will happen to Whyte Arena? “We will be looking at future use for it," said Curtis Dray, the city’s manager of community services. "Council has asked us to figure out what we want to do with the space and come back with some ideas."
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