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"Paul Roth":odzf5hif wrote:The inline rink couldn’t fit in the existing building. I was thinking of putting it on the parking lot to the side of the building, if the DCC is agreeable. It would be a largely outdoors rink with open sides (like the Q-Town ice rink). The main difficulty is the roof: this being Dunedin, it would be good to play in all weather. I was thinking just a plain corrogated iron roof, or maybe even retractable canvas (like at the Cook) for those sunny days! Another issue is the vandals, as Graham mentioned. So the rink would have a wire fence around it (instead of walls). Lighting — for night playing — could be an extra. I reckon there is 200K out there for such a project. The key would be the cost of the roof, since the other elements could easily be covered by the 200k. Or the project could be done in 2 stages, with the roof coming later if there is a lot of inline interest……[/quote:odzf5hif]
Good to know that this is all being thought about Paul.
The thing I would emphasise, is that if you want to look at it seriously, is that a roof should be part of the initial plan. If you don’t have a roof on your rink, you can’t host tournaments, you can’t run a competition like the DIHL, lights or not, because some weeks would get rained out, some games would be on and others not. You’re not going to grow the sport of inline hockey if you can’t do those two things. You’d end up with weeks where there’d be no play at all due to bad weather, and then you’ve lost your income completely, and people would give up because it was unreliable. Marlborough had an outdoor rink, but it just died and their players all went to Nelson, which is a proper building.
You could go without walls, but if you’re going to invest in a facility, even if it’s just roof, boards, goals, and a manual scoreboard, then you want to be able to secure it and charge people $5 to get in and play there. If it’s not secured, then you can’t make money and pay back debt, or build up resources (for lights, walls, maintenance etc). Spending a few thousand on hurricane fences with barbed wire on top would stop people just going down there and mucking around, and also stop skaters and kids and whatnot hanging out there, vandalising it.
So if Ice Sports Dunedin is serious about this, then I’d say you should be looking at a reasonable roof, with wire fencing for now, and maybe having proper walls as options at a future stage. If you put it to the side of the existing building on the carpark, and made the entrance through the ice rink, then you can charge people as they go into the ice rink with a ‘inline hockey charge’, and there’s no additional cost in terms of staff/offices etc. It could be an alternative training facility for ice teams as the ice rink gets busier (week on wheels, week on ice). Other sports could use it as well. It would cost less than training on ice, and you wouldn’t have problems with clashing with social skating, figure skating, speed skating, as I don’t imagine they’d take off down here on wheels (Nelson does all three of those things as well as inline hockey).
If you wanted it to develop into a useful facility in the future, you’d want the roof to be a proper building roof rather than just beams with tin, but obviously beams with tin on them could be done at a much lesser price – some could be done with volunteer labour. Attaching it onto the side of the existing building makes a heap of sense to me, but I’m no architect! Graham could probably comment more.
Inline rinks need a roof, otherwise they’re just really a flat bit of concrete. That’s already available in Dunedin. Inline is much more affected by the elements than ice hockey – you can’t play it if the surface is damp, so Dunedin’s weather would make an outdoor rink only half-useful at best, and objects on the surface cause injuries as they get caught up in the wheels rather than just skidding around on top of the ice.
And if you’re going to build a roof, why not build walls around it to control access, temperature, wind, and keep all the crap off the surface so you don’t have to sweep it every day?
Inline rinks are the same size as ice hockey rinks, though they can be smaller. Nelson’s is about 44 metres by 25 metres, though that’s considered to be small.
I’m aware of the reality of the costs, which is why I never tried to build one! We looked at it a couple of years ago, and a building to hold a 50 x 25 metre rink, which is a realistic minimum, would cost over a million. I presume there’d be some cost savings if you tacked it onto the side of the ice stadium (one wall already exists, plumbing, sewerage already connected to the ice rink.
And who would use a crappy outdoor inline hockey rink when there’s a really good ice rink just inside?
"Paul Roth":2pcbde9t wrote:No way there is going to be a second rink built, at least in my lifetime!! We still haven’t paid off this one. Some of us are toying with the idea of an inline rink next door, though. Is there any support for that? It would be a lot cheaper (to build and to use), and a good way to practice puck handling and generally keeping in shape.[/quote:2pcbde9t]The possibility of there being an inline rink (as an inline nut) is fairly exciting. Some people will be aware that there was an inline club operating out of Dunedin a few years ago, but it fell over when the new ice rink opened as it was running out of a hall and it just couldn’t compete with our excellent ice facility. People just stopped turning up.
A proper inline rink, with a decent surface, boards, netting etc, would open up those possibilities. It would have to be cheaper than ice, both because it’s just cheaper to run an inline rink, but also because it would struggle to compete otherwise. There’s a lot of people, for whatever reason, who regard inline as a lesser sport, some to the extent that they would never play it.
The other problems are that the building is full, so any inline rink would need building work – either an extension on the current building, or a new one. I would guess that a reasonable rink (concrete floor, plus boards and netting, scorebox and scoreboard, benches, spectator seating) could be built for 100 – 200K. A building to put it in? I dunno, but I’d guess that’d bring the price up to half a million at least?
Add that Dunedin isn’t a big city to have both inline and ice (the only city which has both types at present is Auckland, but it has two ice rinks at three or four inline rinks), and the nearest place that plays inline hockey are the Christchurch and Nelson clubs, so competition on the national stage, which is very competitive, involves a lot of travelling. There’s also not really any opportunities for ‘social skating’ which is how the ice rink makes it’s money. Unless you get other sports involved in using the facility (indoor soccer used the old Christchurch one, marching girls was suggested to me once) inline hockey in Dunedin would probably never be big enough to get more than 10 hours a week most weeks. That would struggle to cover a half million dollar debt, so most of the money would need to come from fundraising/grants.
It does however have other advantages. Lots of people can roller-blade, so beginners are easier to pick up. The skills are completely transferrable, so if you can play ice, you can start playing inline really quickly.
Having it linked to the ice rink, if it was done right, would mean good economies of scale. You could share changing rooms, use the one entrance, one shop for food, one set of staff etc etc. If you were really smart you could make the seating between the two turn around so you’d only need to extend the building by the rink, and not add more seating space.
It also would open Dunedin up as being the premiere hockey destination in the country. You’d be looking at people coming down here on Prime Minister’s scholarships, you’d be able to extend the coaching to cover both sports.
All very interesting, but more than I can talk about in my lunch hour!
Kyle
OK, sounds like I should be joining the womens practice as well.
To pick up on Ryan’s point about clashing, there are actually three streams of things we’re trying to keep apart:
1. SIHL practices.
2. Beginners practice and social game
3. DIHL games.Any one of those things can’t be on the same night as either of the other two. DIHL takes two nights. SIHL takes two nights. Wednesday and Friday aren’t available because of schools hockey and disco, so that leaves one day for stream 2 – according to my understanding Saturday, but the DIHA might come back with something different.
Graham mentioned the Peewees Saturday afternoon game. My understanding is (Alex will be playing in it this year, very exciting!) that this is straight after social skating. So there would still be time after that (6:30 and 7:30?) for beginners and social game.
I’ll be calling a meeting some time in the next couple of weeks to get the DIHL rolling – organise advertising, registrations, get a bunch of people to agree with what’s been going around in my head so far etc. I’ll post it here when I’ve set date/time/place etc.
I think the situation with the curling rink is that they put non-curlers on it if they can’t fit things on the main rink. A lot of figure and social skating will be going on it while the Friendship games are on for example.
So it only works as an idea if there’s something using the main rink, which can go on the curling rink. You can’t move hockey there, so that leaves figure skating and social skating. No one has yet suggested playing hockey during the weekend day, and I can’t imagine it would work well given the SIHL teams are all away during weekend days. The only other skating time when hockey would be popular would be Monday evening when the adult skaters are on, and there’s a lot of adult skaters to move onto the smaller rink.
Also, skating has one night a week – and not even a full night at that, and hockey has four nights a week, possibly five. Given that it’s their rink too, it would seem strange that we demand they move when there’s time still available in the evenings.
I’ve never watched James coaching up close, but it’s a Dunedin womens team, and there’s some people in it who are still in the beginners. It’d be work, and I’d hope he’d push people at whatever level they were at, but they’re not all at Premieres level of skill/fitness or anything.
"leftrightconfused":3qt6rea8 wrote:Further to the morning practices
Bear in mind that wednesday nights are still free for the next 2.5 months and then it is only for 3 months that schools monopolise wednesdays.[/quote:3qt6rea8]While the schools competition don’t take Wednesday night until the first week of the second term, we can’t start until mid-March at the earliest due to university students arriving back. But the friendship games start on 20th March, and it’ll be impossible to run it during that time. So the time up until and including Tuesday 27 March is gone. So the first day we could start would be 1 April. Except Friday 6 April is Easter Friday, and varsity and school holidays follow straight on. So it would seem silly to run 1 round of the competition and then have 2 weeks off.
So that means starting 24 April. The 7 week competition would then finish on 10 June.
While it’d be possible to get a couple of rounds in early March, and then one more round in between friendship and the holidays, I don’t think organising a 7 week competition with 4 weeks of breaks in it is going to work too well.
"leftrightconfused":3qt6rea8 wrote:Further again
Because of the amount of time taken to prepare the curling rink for curling my understanding is that they will only allow skating on it under special circumstances not as a matter of course. And how is it Ive ended up with the name gumbie! I would have thought something like Brad Pitt would have been more approriate[/quote:3qt6rea8]Well, I can’t imagine Brad Pitt skates, or plays hockey very well, so perhaps Gumbie in an appropriate term for him here.
While I understand the rink’s position on the curling rink, and it’s entirely possible that it’s going to stay that way, this is going to become a bigger and bigger problem. To have hockey, which takes up most of the time on the rink, unable to use the only ice they can use, because there are figure skaters and weekend social skaters on it, and yet there’s a curling rink there sitting idle much of the time…
And for Chris, Wednesday nights are not available except by act of god, during the schools competition (which runs from beginning of second term through until August). They have this locked down, and because of the nature of school sports (where the days are divided up in logical ways so that students who play similar sports (hockey and ice hockey for example) can play both because they fall on different days.
We get Wednesdays back for the 2nd half of the DIHL, like last year.
I’d be unlikely to come in at 5:30am, but I’d happily come practise at 10pm at night. Or play games. It’s just not a time that works for the DIHL because of the age of players, and the fact we rely on scorebox volunteers and referees.
Yeah, I know there is figure skating on some mornings, though I’m not sure of the details, and I think a couple of high school teams do training in the morning.
The best thing to do would be to talk to Neil or Hans and find out. You’d logically think they’d give you a discounted price, but then again, if they have to get up at 5am to let you in, maybe not!
The beginner session would be moved to another time. I don’t know when that would be, but I’ll make a guess below.
I really don’t know what would happen with the social session. I don’t want to be seen as the person killing the social session, because Sunday DIHL isn’t a great preference for me either, and I enjoy playing in the social session. I’m just not responsible for it, and if the DIHA says “DIHL goes to Sunday, that’s all that is available” then I’ll take what’s offered. It’s easier to move one thing on Sunday night than try and find a block of four and a half hours. There are times available, they’re just not as good.
As an indication of how busy the rink is getting at the height of the hockey season:
Monday Kiwiskate afternoon 4-6. Evening, two hours of Adult Skaters (6:30 – 8:30?). Womens practise 8:30 – 9:30.
Tuesday Figure skaters & peewees practise (the peewees might be moved to Thursday). DIHL 2 games 7 – 9:20.
Wednesday High School Ice Hockey. 4 – 10pm.
Thursday Kiwiskate, Kiwihockey 4- 6. (Peewees?), Midgets, Juniors, Seniors, 6 – 10.
Friday evening disco.
Saturday morning kiwiskate
Sunday morning speed skaters.
Saturday & Sunday 11 – 5, social skating.
Sunday – currently beginners followed by social game, 5:30 – 7:30.Some weekday mornings are taken up by high school ice hockey teams practising.
Into that timetable, which I think I’ve got roughly right, but which there is sure to be more that I don’t knowabout, we need to get the following things:
1: Four B grade DIHL games
2: Senior Non-checking team practises (there are two teams, it’s not clear if there will be one or two practise times required).To fit these in, if we put the 4 DIHL B grade games on Sunday, 5:30 – 10pm. The SNC team would probably have to practise on late Monday evening. Beginners would probably have to go to early Saturday evening. I presume the current social game would go to after that, 6:30 on Saturday. I don’t know if either of them would be successful at those times, but that’s really what’s left. There’s no point running either of them on the same night as the DIHL (Tuesday or Sunday) as they’re both competition with a DIHL grade.
The above is the problem for 2007, it’ll get worse for 2008 if anything grows, probably the greatest risks are the DIHL growing to 14 teams, or the high school competition growing. My experience is that you can’t run four DIHL games on a weeknight, as you can’t start until 6pm because of university/work, and that means you don’t finish until 10:30, which is too late when you’ve got 11 and 12 year olds playing. The ice rink might agree to cut back weekend social skating sessions in time length, but that doesn’t help with weeknights, which is when most hockey has to happen.
This has not been a major problem in Dunedin to date, as the rink hasn’t been full at prime times. As everything grows, we’re increasingly starting to have difficulties getting the good ice times, and only marginal times being available. Weekend mornings, Saturday nights, later weeknights. Don’t even start me on weekday lunch times. If we were all up in Christchurch, the teams up there often have to schedule their practises as late as midnight just to get ice time, and it still costs more than we pay for ice.
The players also aren’t the only concern. We can’t do it weekend afternoons, as our scorebox volunteers aren’t available then. In fact, the whole weekend is out except Sunday night as teams are away around the Southern Region playing games most weekends.
Anyway, more feedback please.
Yeah.
Maybe someone should organise a little import consortium. Twenty people or so, place an order every couple of months, divide the shipping up.
I like SK8, and it’s where I’ve got almost all my stuff from, but the prices just don’t compare, because no hockey shop here sells enough stuff to keep the overheads down to a minimal part of the product price. So I’m holding off getting a helmet, elbow pads, until I can get a good price.
I’ve just been keeping a bit of an eye on this web site that is trying to get into competition with trademe. They’re really failing, most of their categories are empty, but they do have a fair bit of ice hockey stuff – mostly new but out of date stock.
I’ve just bought a new pair of CCM Tacks 252. They’ve got a whole range of sizes up there for $135/pair, which is pretty good. Also pants, helmets, stick blades and shafts.
Anyway, the web site is http://www.letmebid.co.nz. Worth a look.
K, well that’s 2 plus me and Aaron Bryant is keen as well.
Pass this around the likely suspects, anyone you know, we should try and get up to 10 people or so.
Sounds good Stefan. The Phantoms tops should (finally?) be here by March, so they could be an option if you wanted.
I know nothing about the format, and I was away last year so can’t even voice some experience.
Needs a goalie though.
Kyle
