The Saugeen Shores Winterhawks are taking their concerns about ice availability to town council at the January 26 meeting, urging the municipality to move sooner on plans for an additional ice surface.
The Ontario Elite League Hockey team says growing demand for ice time is already putting pressure on minor hockey, adult leagues, and other ice users across the community.
"What we’re seeing everywhere is what we’ve seen for a long time," said Winterhawks president Jordan MacKinnon. "You go back a hundred years, every community built an arena with one ice pad, and that was good. But Saugeen Shores has nearly doubled in size in the last 10 or 15 years, and we still have the same two ice surfaces."
In a message posted to social media, the Winterhawks warned that kids are already travelling more than an hour to find practice ice, and they fear some may soon be turned away from local programs altogether.
"We’re getting to a breaking point here," MacKinnon said. "We’re getting to a point where we’re going to start turning kids away. I’m obviously going as president of the Winterhawks, but we’re looking out for kids here. We want kids on the ice, with good-quality ice time."
The team is pushing back against a recent arena and sports fields needs assessment commissioned by the town, which suggested waiting until 2036 or later to twin The Plex in Port Elgin.
"We disagree vehemently with that," MacKinnon said. "All of us as ice users experience this every day trying to find ice, and it just simply doesn’t exist."
While the Winterhawks primarily use late-night ice, MacKinnon said the shortage affects everything from family attendance to playoff scheduling.
"We’d love to play Saturday early evening or Sunday afternoon games," he said. "We can’t do it, there’s no ice. We’re not going to kick kids off the ice so a bunch of grown men can play hockey."
MacKinnon says the goal of tonight’s delegation is to get council to acknowledge the urgency and begin revisiting the long-term plan.
“Our first step is to get everybody on the same page,” he said. "We need plans in place. We need to know what we need and how much it’s going to cost."
The council meeting begins at 6:30 p.m. and will be livestreamed on the town’s YouTube channel.
