Rosthern's Jubilee Sports Center has reopened to rave reviews after a long revitalization project. (Submitted Photo/Tonya McEachern)

By Rob Mahon

Rosthern Rink Reopened

Hefty price tag yields hefty payoff for Rosthern arena project

Dec 16, 2022 | 12:00 PM

Hockey is the dominant sport in Saskatchewan this time of year, but hockey players need places to play, and those places can take up a lot of maintenance and money. After a lot of both, the Town of Rosthern has been able to reopen the doors to their arena.

At the start of the season, the arena renovation project was officially completed and the doors to the improved facility opened to local athletes and those from nearby communities. So far, the reviews of the arena project have been happy ones.

“It’s really an exemplary facility,” said Rosthern Mayor Dennis Helmuth. “It’s a great improvement to what was there. I think the technologies are running mostly as they should, and I think the user groups are very happy. The demand is strong, a lot of people on ice a lot of the time.”

Winter is hockey season in Saskatchewan, so the arena will likely stay busy for the next few months. Even beyond winter, however, the hope is the new arena will be able to keep ice in during some of the warmer months as well.

“It’s capable of running as long as we need it to,” said Tonya McEachern, recreation and community development manager. “We’re planning on doing some spring hockey into 2023 so we’ll be open hopefully until the end of May, then shut down for the summer for a bit and reopen in the fall.”

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The final price tag on the arena was a hefty one, with a grant from Ottawa supplying nearly $1.5 million and the town itself supplementing that according to Helmuth. As other communities have found, inflation and supply chain issues have made any sort of construction project more expensive.

“I know that once the rebuild was underway, it was a little bit of, ‘Oh, this wasn’t seen in the first analysis or engineering draft’,” Helmuth said. “For example, there was, at one point, kind of an additional wing built out to the south side of the arena for the Zamboni room. When that was built 30 or 35 years ago, that was kind of a small-town project… a lot of that needed to be rebuilt to code.”

Although the facility ended up being a little pricier, the town thinks the extra effort will be worth it in the long run. The kitchen and concession have been fully upgraded, and virtually rebuilt, and will be staffed and running through the winter.

“We have lots of outside communities that support the facility, mainly the community of Warman,” said McEachern. “We have 17 tournaments, five of them are home tournaments and the other town are out-of-town people using our facility. You think of the economic spinoff from that, those out-of-town teams coming in for a weekend and using our gas stations and our restaurants. I think it’s really important to have a facility like this in the community and it helps more than just our recreation area.”

Helmuth added a rink like this could even increase nearby property values, so even people who never step foot in the rink can benefit from it.

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rob.mahon@pattisonmedia.com

On Twitter: @RobMahonPxP