Even though St. Thomas University no longer has a men’s hockey team, it still leases the squad’s former dressing room at Grant-Harvey Centre.
At a cost of $60,000 per year, STU continues to use 6,000 square feet of space at the state-of-the-art arena on Knowledge Park Drive, which opened in 2012. STU will owe that amount to the City of Fredericton every year for the next 20 years.
A significant portion of that space still serves as the STU women’s hockey team’s dressing room, storage, coaches’ office and training area.
The former men’s hockey space is utilized somewhat by the Tommies soccer and rugby teams nowadays. While those squads only play league games from September to November, they train and play on indoor teams during the winter.
Andrew Daniels, a fourth-year STU men’s rugby player, said the former locker room was used by men’s rugby for all its home games at Scotiabank Park South. The artificial turf field adjacent to Grant-Harvey Centre is where the STU soccer and rugby teams practice and play home contests.
“We used it for film sessions at practices too,” said Daniels.
“The women’s [rugby] team used it more than we did because they practiced on that [Scotiabank South] field more often than we did and both the soccer teams used it.”
In December 2015, four months before the Tommies men’s hockey program was scrapped for financial reasons, Fredericton city council extended STU’s lease repayment agreement. It was extended from a decade to 20 years.
The change also allowed STU’s interest rate on the repayment term to be on par with the city’s rate on the money it borrowed to build Grant-Harvey Centre. It had a $29.3-million price tag and was cost-shared by the city, the New Brunswick government and the federal government.
“[Extending the repayment term] was more advantageous to the university,” said Jeffrey Carleton, STU associate vice-president of communications.
The new agreement took effect on Jan. 1, 2016. STU’s outstanding principal balance is about $1.2 million, which didn’t change when the term was extended.
“When we decided to cancel the men’s hockey program, we reached out to the City of Fredericton and informed them of our decision,” said Carleton.
“When you look at the decision to cancel … the biggest impact on the city was that we’re no longer paying for ice rental for the men’s hockey team or the skills clinics that were run by the men’s hockey team.”
The fees for renting the National Hockey League regulation-sized ice surface for men’s hockey at Grant-Harvey Centre were covered by the team’s annual budget, which was an estimated $120,000.
Carleton said the men’s hockey cancellation had no other impact on the capital lease agreement between STU and the city, nor was there any renegotiating of the deal aside from the repayment term being tweaked more than a year ago.
Neither Carleton nor Wayne Knorr, the City of Fredericton communications manager, were aware of any plans on either STU or the city’s part to drastically change the lease.
“Council agreed that it made perfect sense to align STU’s lease with the repaying its 20-year loan [for building the facility],” said Knorr. “That’s why council switched from a 10 to 20-year agreement on that arrangement.”
It may seem like STU is paying the city a fair chunk of change for space that isn’t utilized to its full potential anymore, but Daniels said the men’s rugby team has discussed using the walking track surrounding the ice surface and 1,500 seats for its winter training program.
“I imagine we would have to use the locker room area too,” he said.
Carleton said the rugby and soccer teams also didn’t have an adequate place to call their own or keep their equipment before the men’s hockey team was axed in April 2016.
“Four teams had no locker room space. Now they have that,” he said. “It made perfect sense for us to give [the soccer and rugby teams] access to that space, and I think it has worked for the best.”
Without a major retrofit, Carleton said, the usage options for the space initially designed for STU at Grant-Harvey Centre are limited beyond the Tommies athletics teams.
“It’s a tough space to use for anything else,” he said.
