The Strathmore Family Centre staff are using the facility closure to complete necessary maintenance projects. According to the town, this ensures the arena will be ready to go once it is able to re-open.

As part of the town of Strathmore's declaration of a State of Local Emergency, all recreation facilities, like the Strathmore Family Centre, are closed to the public.

According to the Town of Strathmore, the family centre arena has been closed for two weeks and the ice was removed due to the COVID-19 recreation facility closure measures. Since then a small but dedicated group of staff have been busy getting ready for when things get back to normal. A few of the projects that are currently underway are:

Painting, the staff have prepped and started painting the lobby, hallway and dressing rooms for a fresh coating of paint. So far it has significantly brightened up these spaces. When I started I found the family centre had various parts of the facility painted different colors over the years and as someone who’s picky about consistency we are moving towards getting the entire facility down to a few basic colors, and yes, no more clamshell walls.

Rink board renovations, the blue rinks NW boards have been dismantled for significant welding and repair work due to deterioration of the metal framing and foundation. Some may have noticed a slight distortion in this area of the boards and it has even caused one of the far gates to be inoperable and that will all be corrected.

Changing stalls, this last season we noticed a significant increase in the need for additional changing spaces to accommodate the increase of coed teams. With the facility around 30 years old now the design of the dressing rooms with shared washrooms is a challenge to meet the growing ice user demands of today. As such we have installed two new partitioned changing stalls in one of the officials' rooms to better serve our customers. We are not increasing the size of the facility (right now) but rather being strategic of what spaces we have and making them more multi-functional.

Another area that is a challenge for our 30-year-old building has been the snow pile that our two ice resurfacers use to dump all the ice they remove during floods. With the ice industry seeing increased participation this has meant increased demands of our facility and equipment. Town of Strathmore’s Alternate Public Information Officer Lauren McGougan explained, “In turn this means we dump a lot more snow than they did 30 years ago, as such we are making improvements to better accommodate the quantity of snow as well as improving the safety and efficiency of this process for our staff.”

McGougan continued, “A good example of increasing demand over the last few years at many rinks has been the introduction of cross-ice hockey. This is where a rink board divider system is setup to create two separated halves on a rink allowing for increased play for younger players (essentially there’s less skating after the puck and more actual time passing and handling).”

“This essentially doubled the number of people on the ice, in the stands and dressing rooms. On a busy weekend you really have to give the rink staff kudos for juggling what can seem like a crowded and chaotic mess, but we always try and keep everything on schedule as best we can,” she said.

The Strathmore Public Library and the Happy Gang Seniors Drop-in Centre are also closed until further notice. According to the town, their top priority is to protect the health of Strathmore’s residents while maintaining essential services.

The State of Local Emergency was declared in an effort to support the Province of Alberta with its efforts to slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

For updates on the Town of Strathmore's COVID-19 response visit: https://strathmore.ca/en/covid-19.aspx

Photo credit: Town of Strathmore/Facebook