By / Graham Perkins
Brace yourself. Eleven months from now, Vancouver will host the 2010 Winter Olympics. Much has been made of the spectacle, which will see the greatest athletes from all over the world descend on the Lower Mainland for four weeks (including the Paralympics).
Over a million visitors are expected to flood the city’s streets during that time, and residents are going to have to make sacrifices to make sure everything runs smoothly. Minor hockey is no different.
“People will have to fasten their seatbelts,” said Andrew Mustard, executive director of the Pacific Coast Amateur Hockey Association. “The major impact is going to be on rink closures during the Olympics and carrying on during the Paralympics,”
With Olympic action being centralized in Downtown Vancouver and Whistler, not all associations are going to be effected equally. The biggest crunch will be felt by Vancouver Minor and the Vancouver Thunderbirds, which operate in central Vancouver and Point Grey and will have many of their home rinks taken over from late December to early March.
While the schedule for next season hasn’t been finalized yet – the league is set to meet this week to draft a preliminary version – a few key changes will likely be implemented. Mustard expects the schedule for Vancouver-based teams to be front-loaded, meaning they will play the vast majority of their home games in November and December and will play on the road for most of January and February while their facilities are being used for the Olympics.
Jay Douglas Aikenhead coached the Vancouver Minor Bantam A team this season and has spent his whole life around the rinks in the area.
“It’s going to be very difficult, not to have home ice for a month-and-a-half,” he said. “It makes more sense to shut it down for two weeks, because with the extra traffic, a one-hour commute turns into three hours. You’re talking about maybe driving seven hours for an hour of ice.”
Shutting down the league is an option the league has looked into, but the idea hasn’t gained much traction from teams outside the Olympic epicentre and the league wants to minimize the number of games that need to be re-scheduled to avoid a bottleneck at the end of the season.
“It wouldn’t be fair to shut it down entirely. There are some organizations in the Fraser Valley that won’t be affected at all,” he said. “Including exhibition games, we have 25,000 games in the PCAHA season.”
Despite the inconveniences his organization is expected to face, Aikenhead seems to share the sentiments of most hockey people affected in that he sees it as a huge positive in the long run. This is because, in exchange for one hard season, Vancouver Minor will be able to reap the benefits of massive rink improvements that would not have happened without a major event like the Olympics.
“For us, it’s amazing. We’re essentially getting three new rinks out of it. Britannia hasn’t been improved since its inception 35 years ago. You’re talking about replacing the boards, getting it up to safety standards. Right now, it’s a laughing stock: the kids refer to it as a stinky hole. It’s going to inspire a lot of community pride, and when you’re proud of where you play it changes things.”
Todd Harkins, director of hockey at the North Shore Winter Club, also sees the Olympics as positive for the league in the long run.
“I’ve heard through the grapevine that the season is going to start two weeks earlier, so we need to finalize that before anything. But we need to focus on the bigger picture. It fuels young kids who aspire to be Olympians. That’s the way people need to look at it,” he said.
Also on the table for the league is shortening the tiering round (or “placement process” in league jargon) from four weeks to three and spreading the playoffs over a three-week span to allow for more teams to catch up on missed games.
“The intent of the league is to keep things as normal as possible, while recognizing that this is a once in a lifetime event,” Mustard said.
So although most teams around the Lower Mainland are going to have to make some kinds of concessions in regards to ice time, the main advantage the league has is time itself. Unlike last year’s civil strike, which severely hampered rink activity for several months and forced the league to reschedule games on the fly, the Olympics have been set in stone since July 2, 2003.
And while the strike left teams scrambling to find ice, the Games will leave behind new and renovated facilities ripe for teams to practice on.
“Everyone keeps talking about losing ice at Britannia, but they’re going to renovate the place for us,” said Vancouver Minor Atom A head coach Carl Wood. “We’ll be happy to deal with whatever we have to.” |