The University of Waterloo announced last week that the Physical Activities Complex would be converted to an NHL-sized hockey arena following the buzz its men’s hockey team created when it qualified for the CIS National Championship for the first time in 15 years. The new complex will consume the space currently occupied by the Village 1 Green, Physical Activities Complex and Student Life Centre, and Ring Road will be redirected slightly to accommodate for the new building’s footprint.
Sam Slackerman, the athletics department’s communications director, exhibited excitement for the new development and the university’s focus on excellence. “Waterloo has always prided itself on innovation, and our new hockey arena will be a good way to showcase that Waterloo cares about its athletics as much as its academics,” Slackerman stated. “Having people pay attention to one of our teams is as exciting as it is surprising, so we’ve decided to capitalize on it and focus solely on hockey as a department.”
As part of the change, other teams will no longer be supported. This is to allow the university the ability to focus solely on the only successful team Waterloo has yielded for hopeful fans in years. A proposal to replace Black and Gold Day football game with a hockey game was leaked shortly after the announcement by an anonymous user on Reddit, but university representatives had no comment on the matter when questioned by The Tin Soldier. The proposal also included a recommendation to university administrators to replace Warrior Field with a student services building, citing a need for increased student space on campus and making up for the loss of the Student Life Centre. Particular focus was to be placed on individual study space, a need viewed as unmet by the multiple floors of individual study space currently available to students in both campus libraries.
Money recouped from no longer supporting the infrastructure for other teams will be directed towards dental surgery for members of the hockey team, to ensure Waterloo players perform their best while looking good for the cameras. Critics of the proposal pointed towards Columbia Icefields as an example of an athletic centre more fit for the hockey teams which already use it, but by providing equivalent services in the south campus, Slackerman believes that students will be more willing to partake in what the athletics department believes will be Waterloo’s favourite pastime. “Hockey is already a popular sport across the country,” Slackerman noted, “and we believe Waterloo is in a prime position to become a leader in the hockey research and development fields, finally giving us something athletic that gains the respect of the community that Laurier can’t beat us in.” Waterloo President Feridun Hamdullahpur echoed this belief, stating that the university was “laser-focused” on this new initiative.
Each academic unit is also working towards new ways to advance Waterloo’s dominance in the sport. Members of the applied health sciences faculty will be directing new research projects towards hockey-related injuries, movements and optimizations, to mathematically determine optimal movements for players. New engineering research grants will be earmarked for nanotechnology researchers, who will be designing new materials in tandem with members of the science faculty that keep players wearing less bulky equipment while still being able to maintain a level of safety similar to previous uniforms. Computer science professors will embark upon a five-year plan to mathematically simulate plays to determine which are most efficient to achieve the highest score possible in each game. English professors will aim to discover the most effective trash talk for players to use on the ice by 2015, which will agitate and demoralize the opposing team. Environment faculty researchers aim to study the plants around hockey arenas and examine how their aromas make them “aware” and “one with the ice, Mother Nature and the planet.”
A report on the progress of Waterloo’s new hockey initiative will be released as part of the culmination of Waterloo’s Vision 2020 plan.
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