Club of the week - February 9

Prince of Wales SC

The 2008-09 season has been a busy one for Prince of Wales. We've seen some changes, with Barb Kirkland joining the club as administrator, and starting programmes in a brand-new arena.

Although we are a big club, we face many of the challenges of other clubs in the section (ice time, coaching, recruitment of volunteers). We do have challenges of our own of course, particualrly dealing with the administration of programmes occupying nearly 50 hours of ice at five arenas.

Our membership is at record levels- just over 1100. Most of these are in learn-to-skate programmes with over 600 CanSkaters and 350 plus CanPowerSkaters (most programmes are full). We do have a strong Junior- Senior programme with over 60 in StarSkate/ Competitive.

The CanPower skating programme got on the ice early, at the beginning of September with Fall school. As usual this proved popular and CanPower has filled up for most of the year, with 8 hours of ice/ week. Chris Pitcher, our head CanPower coach stepped down at Christmas after twenty years with the club. Chris has been replaced by long-time coach Craig Squires, and we're hoping to train new coaches to step in. One of our more successful programmes is a CanPower session designed for females only, popular with both recreaional hockey players, and those taking up hockey in high school.

We're running a Canskate session in the brand new arena in Torbay, and this has proved very popular, already full right through to Spring. It looks like being a great place for skating, and we look forward to hosting Provincials there in February. Overall we're running 7 Canskate sessions, plus four preskate, an adult Canskate, and a Canskate specifically designed for teenagers. We plan to continue CanSkate into the spring, an innovation tried two years ago that has proved very popular.

Ten years ago the club only had one synchro team, but now we operate six. The club's Junior synchro team, Synergy recently travelled to Halifax where they finished 8th at Eastern Regionals, and we also run teams at CanSkate, PreJuvenile, Juvenile, Novice and Masters. They look forward to Synchro provincials next week.

Although our size means we can suport full time administrative support, the club, like all others in the section is run by a volunteer executive - five of which you'll also find on the ice on the Masters Synchro team or adult CanSkate sessions!.

We plan to run an ice show this year, following recent practice of sharing set-up/ set work with our friends at Mount Pearl SC. Plans are well under way!

We're particularly excited about showcasing the new NE Avalon arena at Provincials and look forward to seeing everyone there! Check our website for more news.

Please e-mail a short piece and a couple of photos about your club to Dave Liverman for inclusion in this feature