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City of Lethbridge to help Hurricanes find alternate playoff venue for 2019

Mar 17, 2018 | 6:00 AM

LETHBRIDGE – The Lethbridge Hurricanes are working with the City of Lethbridge, to address their concerns centred around the 2019 World Men’s Curling Championship coming to the city next spring.

The announcement came Wednesday, Mar. 14, with event organizers explaining that the 13-team curling tournament will run Mar. 30 to Apr. 7 at the ENMAX Centre – about the same time as the first round of the WHL playoffs.

Should the Hurricanes make the playoffs again next year, that would leave them looking for somewhere else to play temporarily.

“There’s huge challenges when you’re not in your building, because obviously, there’s revenue streams that need to pay for your budget in the regular season, and when you start making money, it’s normally after the regular season in the playoffs,” explained team president Doug Paisley, in an interview with Lethbridge News Now.

While he did note that options such as reversing home-ice advantage and some other scheduling options exist, there are currently too many unknowns, such as the length of a playoff series. Because of that, Paisley said they will have to consider an alternate venue, and that they would be forced to look well beyond city limits.

“There’s nowhere else to play in Lethbridge,” he stated. “I mean, I just don’t think you can do that to your fans and say, ‘We’re holding a draw and only a thousand of you get to come and watch us at Nicholas Sheran.’

“Are we going to try to move to Calgary to play, would we have to go into Medicine Hat, Kootenay, depending on their schedules?” said Paisley, listing potential options. “There’s no where in [south-western] Alberta that can accommodate even our season ticket holders… there’s no rink that holds 2,200, and honestly, we need room for over 5,000.”

Despite their concerns however, Paisley acknowledged that they’re not against the curling tournament coming to Lethbridge.

“I can’t stand here and say that the Lethbridge Hurricanes organization would be in support of losing our home ice,” he started. “But obviously, we’re going to support a world curling event coming to Lethbridge. We know, and we obviously support the economic impact for Lethbridge – filling our hotels and restaurants, and our city being show-cased on an international scale – we understand how important that stuff is… but it’s not the best-case scenario for the Lethbridge Hurricanes.”

With a year now to come up with a plan, Paisley noted that they do have the support of the city in finding a solution.

“The city has assured us that they understand the financial constraints, they understand what’s involved and what’s at stake, and they want to make it right. We got to trust that we’re going to be able to work together and come up with a solution. Like I said, it’s not ideal and it’s certainly not ‘plan A,’ we’re going to have to come up with a ‘plan B’ and make it work,” he said.

“I guess we’ve got a fairly current blue-print of what success looks like, having 10 playoff games last year, so we do have a good template to work off, on what things from a revenue standpoint need to be at,” Paisley added.

“It’s called home-ice advantage for a reason,” he continued. “Our boys like playing in front of our fans, our fans enjoy watching our team, they’ve shown that the way it was last year [in the playoffs].”