A burgeoning post-Christmas tradition that features a quintessential Canadian pastime is returning to Chestermere Lake this holiday season.
After being cancelled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Chestermere’s Western Canadian Pond Hockey Championship is returning to the lakeside city from Dec. 27 to 29.
“Living in Chestermere, we have the lake sitting in our backyard,” said tournament organizer and chairman Alex Halat. “What a great opportunity to use it to market our community to the rest of western Canada, and [also provide] a little economic stimulus to our local businesses, who do benefit from the three or four days of the event.”
Differing from the first two iterations, this year’s tournament will be youth-only, according to Halat, who added 75 teams are registered to compete.
With about 750 players set to take part, Halat said the 2021 event should see roughly double the number of competitors as the inaugural tournament in 2018.
“We’re excited to bring it back,” he said. “With the layover we had with COVID, we had to shelf it for a couple of years.”
First held in 2018, the Western Canadian Pond Hockey Championship pits teams against each other the way nature intended the sport to be played – on a frozen lake surface. The games feature a four-on-four format with no designated goalies, and are played on an 80-foot-long, 50-foot-wide surface with no boards. Halat said 14 man-made rinks will be fashioned this month to accommodate the games.
The event has been highly popular since the inaugural tournament, with 85 teams from 12 age divisions taking part in 2019. That year's event also included a ringette tournament to go alongside the hockey games.
According to Halat, organizers intended to introduce additional components in 2020, including outdoor curling and an ice-fishing derby.
But in order to keep crowd sizes reasonable, he said those activities won’t be held this year, adding organizers intend to introduce them for the 2022 tournament.
“Due to COVID this year, we’ve had to make a lot of changes, so we actually wiped out all the adult teams from the tournament, just due to COVID regulations with checking vaccination and all that stuff,” he said.
“Unfortunately, we also had to wipe out the curling aspect, because at 75 teams, we’re looking at a few thousand people a day. Adding curling to it would have just added more, and we’re trying to mitigate the exposure to everyone. Being it’s an outdoor event, we’re fine, but we’re trying to mitigate the number of people there at any given time.”
Despite being a relatively new Christmas-week event, Halat said the Western Canada Pond Hockey Championship has already become a popular tradition in Chestermere. He feels it’s become one of the most unique outdoor community events, and possibly the largest outdoor hockey event, in North America.
He added he wanted to thank the tournament’s main sponsors and donors – the Chestermere/Langdon Oilmen’s Association, Chestermere Rotary Club, the Chestermere Tim Hortons, and the City of Chestermere.
“We have some amazing volunteers and everyone is stepping up to the plate to make it another successful event,” he said, adding organizers are crossing their fingers for decent weather.
“We’ve been pretty lucky the last few years,” he said. “Looking at the long-range forecast, it looks like Mother Nature is willing to work with us once again.”
For more information on the event, visit wcpondhockey.com
