Curling clubs losing numbers
The good news for curling is new rinks are opening. The bad news is even more are closing.
Chilliwack, B.C., Berwick, N.S., Chelsea and Riviere-duLoup, Que., have opened, or are about to open, new facilities for their local curling clubs this year.
Regina’s Tartan Club, Toronto’s Scarboro curling club, Winnipeg’s West Kildonan, and the Churchill Curling Club in Innisfil, Ont., have shuttered in the last two years.
Winnipeg’s Rossmere Curling Club announced in September operations are suspended for 2018-19 due to an expensive equipment failure. Toronto’s Weston club has also suspended curling operations for the season.
Reasons for closures are mostly financial, stemming from a combination of dropping memberships to aging icemaking equipment and buildings to high utility and insurance bills.
For curling facilities attached to golf clubs — a sport also struggling to attract memberships — curling can get sacrificed, as was the case with Scarboro.
According to the Toronto Star, golfing shareholders voted in favour of a public transit expansion that demolished the curling club.
Laura Walker, a former Canadian junior champion who won a world championship bronze medal this year in mixed doubles, threw her first stone at Scarboro at age six.
“Where the impact is the saddest is that these people are forced to go to new clubs and they’re kind of spread out all across the city,” Walker said. “It breaks up these really longtime camaraderies that have been around for years.
“My mom is playing quite a bit less this year. My dad isn’t even playing this year. This is probably the first year in 30 years that he’s not playing three, four or five nights a week.
“It forces some people out of the sport and forces others to play a little bit less. For club curlers, they go for the people, their friends and that sort of thing.”
Danny Lamoureux, Curling Canada’s director of championship services and curling club development, acknowledges the country is losing “too many” facilities.
Curling Canada is resurrecting the Curling Assistance Program (CAP) that operated between 1999 and 2016 in a different format.
“We’d been doing some lobbying and advocacy work with the federal government trying to tap into the infrastructure monies that the government has introduced to stimulate the economy,” Lamoureux explained.
“Most of those grants are based on one-third, one-third, one-third. The feds will contribute a third if the province, territory or municipality gives a third and the person looking for a grant contributes a third.”
CAP will provide loans towards capital projects at less than prime with a reasonable payback schedule, he explained.