IMPACT ON THE KNIGHTS OF THE CLOSURE OF PLEASANTVIEW ARENA
To All Knights Players, Parents, Coaches, Convenors and Officials:
By now many of you will have heard that the City of Toronto has decided to close Pleasantview Arena for the remainder of the hockey season due to safety concerns arising from their ongoing renovations of the Pleasantview Community Centre. The City’s decision on December 20th was a surprise to everyone from the City Permit officers, to the GTHL and to the Knights House League. Once the decision was communicated, the Knights reached out to many sources to find as much replacement ice as possible. We have lost a total of 15 hours of weekly ice across our Learn to Play, House League, Select and GTHL divisions. We are happy to report that we have protected our core programs and will be publishing revised practice and game schedules for impacted divisions. We would like to thank the GTHL, our neighbouring hockey leagues, and the city permit staff in making the best of a bad situation and supporting the Knights in our time of need.
You may notice some changes to timing and locations for practices and/or games and we hope you will be happy that you can continue to enjoy the exciting second half of the season.
The biggest change you may notice is the Sunday ice we did obtain from various sources changes week to week: there was simply no single arena that had the ice available that was needed each week. So we have patched together blocks of ice that allow us to continue to offer a full set of Sunday games, albeit at a variety of arenas you may have yet to visit.
We have not found enough ice to retain all of our optional yet VERY popular skills sessions; however, by combining practice times and adjusting practice times we have managed to retain two hours for the skills sessions to continue, inclusive of our goalie skills training for our House League goalies. Please speak to your coach if your goalie is interested in leveraging this goalie training. More details of the Skills and Goalie Development program will be communicated as soon as possible.
The exact timing and location for house league team practices and/or games were communicated yesterday to all the coaches through the division convenors. We hope to have all game schedules for the winter season posted to the website and the Win, Lose or Tie app within the next two days, but in the interim you should be hearing from your team coach in advance of your next practice and game on January 6th and 7th, respectively.
Thank you for your on-going support as we try to address this setback in the most effective way possible.
The North York Knights Executive