Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:I don't anything specific, but it wouldn't shock me. The relationship between the club and Ion is not good. And the locker rooms at St. James can't be any worse than the ones at Ion.
What’s led to a bad relationship between the 2?
Keep in mind that everything I'm writing here is from a WLC perspective. I'm sure there is another side to the story. I just don't know what it is.
I think Ion was established by people rooted in the figure skating community, and they hoped to be the flagship figure skating rink in the region. I don't think they like hockey, or thought much about it when designing the facility (note how small the locker rooms are; a team of U18 players can't fit into one of them). But there isn't enough money from local figure skaters to make a facility like Ion work from a financial standpoint, so they were forced to do more hockey than they wanted.
When WLC came to Ion for the 2020-21 season (the Covid season), there was bound to be friction. All the Covid-era restrictions made people (of all views on Covid safety) cranky, and little things got blown out of proportion. For example, my kid's team was constantly being threatened by rink management for allegedly trashing their locker room by getting it wet, when all that was happening was the kids were showering and the poorly designed showers couldn't keep the water in the shower areas of the tiny locker rooms. The kids (and their parents) felt like they were being picked on by rink management, and I'm sure rink management thought they were bunch of entitled arrogant a-holes. The rink wasn't very accommodating on scheduling issues, and didn't (from a WLC perspective) take into account the fact that many WLC opponents were traveling in from 4, 5, or even 6 hours away and didn't take kindly to having games cut short because the ice slots were too short.
All this friction led to be bad feelings, which I'm sure have fed on themselves over the past few seasons.