96-5 The Ranch has junior hockey excitement coming up tonight from the Centennial Place Arena in Three Hills.
The Mountain View Colts will try to make it three wins in a row when they face off with the Ponoka Stampeders. Listen to live play-by-play coverage at 8:45pm.
Mountain View had hoped, along with all of the Didsbury arena user groups, to get back to using the main ice surface by February 1st, but now the Town has announced that won’t be possible. According to the Town of Didsbury, “the Town and the contractor fully explored a number of different options, but none were successful; installing ice prior to replacing the condenser is no longer and option for the arena. An ammonia leak had been discovered in the condenser unit/cooling tower on the exterior of the facility during regular maintenance back in December. It resulted in the ice being removed from the arenas and the curling rink. A plan was then put in place to try and use a rental chiller unit but the Town has revealed that “once the contractor began the process of setting the unit up and connecting to the existing system, it became apparent that it would not work as proposed.”
Colts Head Coach Ron Doig reacted to today’s news. He says “maybe that’s best. Now we know that for sure that we are out and we can move on. I know Karen (Rothenbusch, Colts General Manager) is working hard on trying to getting some better options than what we’ve been working with for this moth so far. I think it has been showing a little bit in our game. We are kind of out of sync, a little bit out of sorts. They don’t have a room to put their stuff in and have kind of a home base. Practices are different times of night. Basically, they are getting later and later. We started kind of at 9:15pm time, 9:30, 9:45. Next week was supposed to be 10:00 so, you know, that all adds up. Guys are traveling a long ways. I think maybe now we have some certainty we aren’t going back to Didsbury and we can get everyone focused on this is where we are going to be and this is what we are going to do.
The Colts won both their games last weekend by scores of 6-3 in Airdrie on Friday and 4-3 in a shootout over the Three Hills Thrashers in Innisfail on Saturday.
Meanwhile, Ponoka has just 1 win all season. It came back on November 23rd when the Stamps topped the Copperheads 5-2 in Coaldale. Overall, the Stampeders are 1 and 32. They have lost 15 consecutive games. Mountain View is 3 and oh against Ponoka this season.
96.5 The Ranch spoke with Ron Doig.
