Credit Union Place (CUP) employees were busy Monday morning reverting Eastlink Arena into a hockey rink after it spent the previous week hosting the Home Hardware Road to the Roar Olympic curling pre-trials.

Crews were busy at Credit Union Place in Summerside, Monday, removing the curling ice from Eastlink Arena. The facility hosted the Home Hardware Road to the Roar Olympic curling pre-trials from Nov. 6 to 12. – Colin MacLean

While the CUP crew was working on the ice, Tilmon Pineau was enjoying a coffee in the facility lobby.

Pineau has been a fan of curling for a long time and attended several of the event’s matches.

Overall he gave it a great review, but was sad that more people didn’t take advantage of it.

JP Desrosiers, Summerside’s community services director, said the event sold about 18,000 tickets. Desrosiers estimates the event brought more than 330 athletes and reporters alone to the Summerside area.

In terms of economic spinoff for the area, he pointed to the Kitchener-Waterloo 2014 Road to the Roar, which, in a post event review, was shown to have generated $2.4 million. Summerside’s event is expected to have exceeded that number. 

They could have, however, done without the high temperatures and rain that conspired to create challenging humidity levels in the arena on the second day of the event. To compensate for those conditions, they had to drop the temperature in the arena that day. 

The event also saw a logjam of required tie-breaker games, which was problematic for the Remembrance Day ceremonies scheduled to take place on the ice surface on Nov. 11. 

“The City of Summerside just really stepped up. That’s a world class facility,” said Al Cameron, director of communications and media relations with Curling Canada.

The success of the Road to the Roar will be a feather in the community’s cap if it decides to pursue similar or even larger Curling Canada events in the future, he added.

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