Outdoor rinks, but no hockey
Outdoor rinks can open but there can’t be any hockey, says Dr. Mylène Drouin.
Over the last few years, while boards still go up in parks, I’ve rarely seen the rinks in use. Winter is now such a chronic cycle of freeze and thaw that I doubt that outdoor ice is very appealing.
dwgs 19:12 on 2020-10-28 Permalink
Well here in NDG they usually put the boards up early in October and they haven’t so I assume the city works crews have already decided that it’s a good excuse to do even less work than usual. The rinks get a ton of use around here, especially in the evenings, we avoid the more popular ones because there are too many players. Also, the fact that kids can’t even play outdoors seriously sucks. I’m far from a covidiot but at some point we’re going to have serious mental health problems with the kids if they aren’t allowed to be kids at all for the foreseeable future.
walkerp 19:48 on 2020-10-28 Permalink
Why can’t the kids play outdoors?
dwgs 20:37 on 2020-10-28 Permalink
Sorry, should have said ‘play hockey outdoors’. I’m specifically talking about adolescents / teens / young adults.
Kate 20:51 on 2020-10-28 Permalink
walkerp, pickup hockey is a contact sport.
dwgs, they’re already considering that.
dwgs 21:05 on 2020-10-28 Permalink
Kate, pickup hockey is not a contact sport. The rules are understood by all and if someone doesn’t know they quickly get told. Generally speaking players only have skates, gloves, and a stick (some wear helmets) so there’s no contact and you’re not supposed to lift the puck because nobody wants to get a frozen puck in the shin.
dwgs 21:14 on 2020-10-28 Permalink
And as to your link let’s just say I’ll believe it when I see it. They’re going to increase access to practitioners? How? Where are all these new practitioners going to come from? We don’t have enough of them now and there’s no way a whole lot of new ones are going to come online anytime soon. I’ve had reason to need a mental health professional for an adolescent and the waiting lists are literally years long so the only choice is to go private at 150 to 250 dollars an hour. I’d rather see organized sports continue with safeguards in place before the damage is done.
Kate 21:51 on 2020-10-28 Permalink
dwgs, OK, sorry. I thought pickup hockey was fairly anarchic.
I agree it’s grim. But panning over major social upheavals that would’ve touched Canadian society over the last century – how did kids manage who lived through the Spanish flu, the Depression, two world wars? Most didn’t have access to mental health practitioners – the idea of mental health has evolved a lot over the century, too – but society didn’t fall apart.
j2 22:13 on 2020-10-28 Permalink
I see dense basketball games and some soccer games in Saint Raymond. It would be trivial to stop after dusk, stop turning on the lights. Wouldn’t stop daytime games though.
I don’t see how they can stop hockey games unless they put up barriers or something. At least the hockey players seem to be from the same neighborhood. There aren’t enough people in those age groups playing basketball to be from Saint Raymond.
Kevin 23:26 on 2020-10-28 Permalink
Not sure if I mentioned this before, but when this all started my dad talked to my kids about his experiences with polio epidemics, and the people he knew who died or were crippled etc.
One thing that is different now is that online life is incredibly active. My kids have very vibrant group chats running on a constant basis with friends and classmates.
The kids are going to be all right.
walkerp 05:45 on 2020-10-29 Permalink
Oh dwgs meant “play hockey outdoors”. I read play as in they can’t play in general.
Raymond Lutz 08:21 on 2020-10-29 Permalink
Covid-19 is an indoor, small, badly aerated closed space disease (think classrooms and crowded workspaces). No need to close large gyms and interior pools, neither smaller places where air is exchanged more than 9 times per hour. (HVAC literature uses ACH as unit). https://pinboard.in/u:lutzray/t:covid-19/t:aerosols/