City View Curling Club due for an upgrade; Mont Ste. Marie seeks FIS status
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Two venerable winter sports venues in the Ottawa area are about to get an upgrade.
As president of the City View Curling Club, Brian Evernden is overseeing the building of a four-sheet, $4 million facility, to give its members more ice time and possibly produce more champion curlers. The ground breaking ceremony is May 13 with the opening slated for January.
Julie Klotz, a former national slalom champion, is leading the charge to raise $150,000 to re-establish an internationally approved alpine run at the Mont Ste. Marie ski area in Lac Ste-Marie, Que. If successful, it would be the only FIS-approved (International Ski Federation) training and racing course in the region.
Both venues have a rich sports history. World championship silver medallist Rachel Homan skipped her City View rink to three Ontario bantam championships from 2004-06. Dustin Cook, drew on the training he received at Mont Ste. Marie, to capture a super-G silver medal at the 2015 world skiing championships and his first super-G victory in the World Cup finale.
In 1957 City View opened in a Quonset hut made of prefabricated steel. A decade later, change rooms and a second storey were added. The three-sheet club has stayed that way for almost 60 years and now the old building will be retired.
City View, on Capilano Drive off Merivale Road, has had more than 500 members for the past three seasons, well over capacity for its adult, youth and Special Olympics programs. The rule of thumb for usage is 125 curlers for a sheet of ice.
“The age of the building makes it no longer economical to run as it stands,” said Evernden, who saw the club close for two to three weeks this season when a compressor blew up.
“We were trying to fit 500 into it and we didn’t have as much flexibility to allow enough curling opportunities a week,” Evernden added. “The facility needs to be modernized and brought into the 21st century.
“The question was ‘Can we do it with the old building?’ The short answer was no. The electrical couldn’t take it. The building code wouldn’t stand for it. We don’t want to make it less user-friendly. Simply, it was old and worn out. It was time for a change.”
The new club building, with a spacious member/spectator lounge, larger change rooms and washrooms, a full kitchen, a licensed bar and a community meeting room, will be on one floor to make it fully accessible to all curlers. It also will feature a fourth ice sheet.
In March, building committee co-chairs Cheryl Carroll and Julie Teed announced the new building project would go ahead, after receiving private mortgage financing. The mortgage is about $2.4 million. The club also is selling bonds and promissory notes to its members, and has refundable grants from the Ontario Curling Association and the Ottawa Valley Curling Association. City View recently received a $10,000 Bricks and Mortar grant from the Canadian Curling Association.
City View also has a naming rights campaign, is promoting sponsorship and advertising opportunities, hopes to expand its membership and has organized three raffles.
McDonald Brothers Construction will build the new club as well as purchase the existing curling venue.
It’s all downhill at Mont Ste. Marie
Julie Klotz wants to give area alpine ski racers a lift at Mont Ste. Marie.
“As many know, our region no longer has a FIS homologated GS (giant slalom) race hill because of the tighter safety standards,” Klotz wrote in an email.
The plan is to re-establish a world-class giant slalom, slalom and U16 super-G race and training hill by lengthening and widening the Outaouais run at Mont Ste. Marie. The minimum FIS standards are 40 metres wide with a vertical drop of 250 metres.
“This is obviously essential to our older athletes, but still crucial to our younger athletes (who) are training and racing on approved runs and in safe environments,” she added.
“This is also very important for athlete development and will give our region the chance to produce athletes (who) train and will be ready to compete at the FIS level. There are not a lot of mountains in the east with FIS GS runs and we want to be one of them.”
To learn more about the project, which has raised more than $91,000, and to contribute visit: gofundme.com/montstemarie
Martin Cleary’s High Achievers column appears bi-weekly in the Citizen. If you know an athlete, coach, team or builder you consider a high achiever, contact Martin at martincleary51@gmail.com.
CAPITAL SPORTS HUB
• Kanata curler Craig Savill is a free agent. Glenn Howard, one of curling’s legendary skips, shook up his team late last month, after a disappointing 2014-15 season. Savill was released along with third Jon Mead. “It was a shock, but not surprising,” said Savill, who had been Howard’s lead since 2004, winning eight Ontario, two Canadian and two world championships. “I know he (Howard) wanted to play with his son (Scott, lead) before his retirement.” Savill, 36, wants to continue as an elite curler and would prefer to remain with an Ontario-based rink, since he works is an investment advisor for Sun Life Financial. While he has heard from a lot of people, he hasn’t made a decision about joining a new team. But he would like to play on a rink that would challenge to play in the 2016 Brier in Ottawa. “I had a feeling something was coming, but not this year,” added Ottawa’s male athlete of the year in 2012 and 2007. “My goal was to play in the Brier in Ottawa. When I heard the news, it was definitely a blow for my career goal. But I have no hard feelings. I cherish all the memories.”
• The Rideau Curling Club rink of skip Diane Favel, Sheila Rogers, Edna Legault and Sue Collar won the women’s silver medal at the Canadian masters curling championships in Whitehorse, after losing the final 4-3 to British Columbia’s Karen Lepine. Favel, who won the 2013 gold medal with skip Joyce Potter of Ottawa, finished with an 8-3 record.
• Take a bow Ottawa Marathon organizers. If you were to put the list of the top-five finishers of the 2015 Boston Marathon beside the best five from the 2014 Ottawa Race Weekend’s Ottawa Marathon, you might do a double take. Ethiopia’s Yemane Adhane Tsegay, who won the 40th Ottawa marathon in a course record and Canadian-soil best two hours, six minutes, 54 seconds, placed second at Boston on Monday to countryman Lelisa Desisa (2:09:17) and missed his eighth career win by 31 seconds. Kenya’s Wesley Korir, who placed fourth in the 2014 Ottawa Marathon in 2:09:17, placed fifth in Boston Marathon at 2:10:49. Korir was the 2012 Boston champion.
• Maxime Leboeuf was the top Ottawa-Gatineau runner in the Boston Mararthon, placing 35th and being the third Canadian. The Gatineau athlete ran an exceptional race, finishing in 2:25:10, cutting almost two minutes off his personal best.
• Natasha Watcham-Roy of Gatineau and the Hull Volants made a notable debut with the national women’s rugby team as Canada placed sixth (4-2 record, plate semifinalist) in Rugby Canada’s inaugural World Rugby Women’s Sevens Series stop in Langford, B.C. Watcham-Roy was a substitute, but played at least two games, scoring two trys in a 47-0 round-robin win over South Africa and one try in a 45-0 plate semifinal victory over Fiji, after Canada lost its Cup quarterfinal 12-5 to England. Canada, which lost the plate final to the United States and was sixth overall, is in second place behind New Zealand in this Olympic qualifying series for the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro. Two tournaments remain in England and The Netherlands.
• Nepean Wildcats made the most of their 2015 Ontario Women’s Hockey Association provincial championships experience in the GTA, winning five medals, including gold in the midget A final. The Wildcats also received silver medals from their bantam B and novice B teams and bronzes from their bantam A and peewee B sides. Ottawa Ice earned bronze medals in the midget B and atom AA championships. Silver medals also were collected by the Ottawa Valley Thunder bantam BB and the Gloucester-Cumberland Stars peewee BB clubs. Russell Castors collected the peewee C bronze. Last month, Clarence Rockland went 4-0 and won the intermediate B gold medal.
• University of Toronto’s Eli Wall of Ottawa, the CIS male swimmer of the year, has been named to the 16-member Canadian swim team for the 2015 Summer Universiade in Gwangju, South Korea, July 3-14.
• The Rideau Canoe Club has received a grant of $76,200 from the Ontario Trillium Foundation to upgrade its Mooney’s Bay race course for the 2015 Canadian sprint canoe kayak championships Aug. 25-30 and the Ottawa Dragon Boat Festival June 25-28.
• The Greater Ottawa Fastball League has added an eighth franchise, the Ottawa Valley A’s. They will join Fitzroy Harbour West Carleton Electric, Quyon Flyers, Micksburg Twins, Stittsville 56ers, Kanata Pirates, I4C Victory and Kars Aces for an 18-game season beginning the week of May 11.
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