After extended shutdowns due to heat exchanger issues and the recent Legionella outbreak, user groups at Rotary Place, the municipal twin-pad arena, will soon be able to resume their on-ice programming.
Both ice pads are expected to be fully operational next week, and Orillia Minor Hockey Association president Steve Fagan is among many looking forward to returning to regular programming.
Various local user groups had to make do with the single-pad Brian Orser Arena in recent months as the city worked on an interim solution for Rotary Place, which brought significant reductions to available ice time.
“I think people are pretty happy that we’re hopefully returning to normal for ice times for Orillia Minor Hockey,” Fagan told OrilliaMatters. “Once we’re on it for a few days, we should be more comfortable moving forward.”
Although Rotary Place will soon be fully operational again, the city’s user groups are not out of the woods yet.
The extended shutdowns this fall left Orillia Minor Hockey scrambling to reschedule 29 games through the winter. Eighteen have been rescheduled so far, and Fagan hopes the rest can be formally rescheduled soon.
“As you might expect, there’s a lot of ice schedulers on holidays this week, so we’re not able to do the rest of the rescheduling until next week,” he said.
A number of parents, as well, have grown frustrated with reduced ice time through the fall, and many have requested rebates.
“We were only able to provide 40 hours, approximately, of ice programming per week, (and) we normally provide 75 to 80 hours per week, so we’re at half our programming,” Fagan said.
“Some people were frustrated with that, which is understandable. We can’t calculate any refunds without knowing the full schedule moving forward, so we’ve been unable to do that (yet).”
Fagan said once Orillia Minor Hockey is aware of the full schedule, users will be able to get rebates where applicable.
The reduced ice time through the fall led to many parents pulling their kids out of house-league hockey, Fagan said, as well as the introductory hockey program.
“We’ve lost a lot of members on our house-league side because they’re able to go to other organizations,” he said, explaining rules about residency limit movement of rep players.
“We actually haven’t really wanted to look at how many we’ve lost. I would expect we’ve probably lost at least 25 to 40 kids.”
