Dedicated Ice Sure Would Be Nice

As with any arena curling club, it does not take too long for the membership to start dreaming of their own dedicated ice.  Concepts were discussed, buildings were toured, budgets were made, and business plans put together.  But the roadblock that was continually run into was that we didn’t have much money as a club, had not located a municipality that would partner with us to build a club, and we hadn’t found our financial whale who could donate or loan us the large amount of money we would need to build a club.

We remained confident that operating a curling club in Cincinnati would not be an issue once built, because there were always plenty of new faces who wanted to come out and curl with us.  Our only problem was trying to retain people when we were curling at 10:30pm on a Friday night, had no access to anywhere to broom stack at 1am after we curled, and dealt with the common arena ice problems.  For anyone reading this who has never curled on arena ice, let me first say we are not referring to Championship Arena Ice.  We are talking about curling 20 minutes after 6 hockey games have been played, where a rock can commonly curl as much as 15 feet (yep that’s not a typo) and trying to predict what a rock will do is like trying to predict… well it’s just not possible.

And to top that off, for the privilege of playing on such terrible ice, we were paying around $360 per hour for ice time.  This basically meant that even if we filled the terrible ice time and played not eh terrible conditions, are hope was to break even on the money, so we were never able to get ahead.  Couple that with no ability to get a few days of ice time without interruption, so there was no chance to host a spiel.  Ultimately our club was the real-world equivalent of a single parent working 3 jobs, still living paycheck to paycheck, just doing well enough to scrape by.