Summerside Wellness Centre

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The Summerside Wellness Centre is a brand new facility opened in stages in 2006 and 2007. The swimming pool portion consists of a 25 metre competition pool, a water slide, a water mushroom, a hot tub, steam room, and sauna. There is also a conference centre over 4000 square feet in size, and a gym. This portion opened during the spring of 2006. The second portion, the Arena, was designed to replace Cahill Stadium and Steele Arena. The approximately 4000 seat stadium opened March 1, 2007, featuring a game between divisional rivals the Summerside Western Capitals, and Charlottetown Abbies. The caps won the game 11-3 in front of over 3100 fans. The arena is the 5th largest in Atlantic Canada, behind the Halifax Metro Centre, Moncton Coliseum, Mile One Centre and Harbour Station. The ice surface measures 200' long by 85' wide. The rink has 10 luxury boxes lining the east wall, and has 8 foot high glass surrounding the entire ice surface. The rink employs angled lights for the benefit of players in sports such as Volleyball, so the lights do not shine into their eyes, and the scoreboard retracts into the rafters quite easily for shows requiring a high ceiling, such as a Monster Truck event. There is also a running track at the top of the seating bowl. These features make no difference for the game of hockey, but make the facility much more attractive in its mission of being a multifunction facility. The secondary ice surface consists of a 200' by 85' rink, as well as bleacher style seating for approximately 500 people. The secondary ice surface opened March 2nd 2007. A new set of bowling lanes was opened in the facility as a replacement to the old lanes at Cahill Stadium.

Construction of the facility was marred by delays. A fault in the construction of the 25 metre pool caused the base to hit ground water, and could not be made as deep as necessary. Also, the pool was measured without the tiles and grout put on, making it even smaller when complete, and therefore could only have 7 lanes. Due to these errors, it cannot be used for formal competitions, as was intended. There was also a large explosion on the roof during construction, injuring several firefighters, and setting the construction back many months. The second phase (main phase, or rink phase) was delayed due to a lack of workers caused mainly by a heavy outflux of skilled tradesmen to Alberta to work in the Oil Fields. The facility cost the City of Summerside approximately 36 million Canadian Dollars, shared between the Municipal, Provincial, and Federal Governments.