Community organizers like Team Moncton co-chair Bill Whalen say the IIHF World Junior Ice Hockey Championships, with games in Moncton, N.B., and Halifax, N.S., were a resounding success despite being planned on an extraordinarily short timeline.
“If you saw the plaza, virtually every day was jam-packed with people, kids skating on the rink, families skating on the rink. Food trucks were busy, the music was great,” he said in an interview on Tuesday.
There were at least 4,500 people at the Avenir Centre for each game according to Moncton Venues Manager Shane Porter.
“The Avenir Centre wasn’t in operation for that long before we hit the world coming to a stop with COVID, so I do believe for sporting events we hit some records throughout this tournament which is amazing,” Porter said on Tuesday.
Quarterfinal games in the tournament ended Monday, with semi-final matches slated to begin at the Scotiabank Centre in Halifax on Wednesday.
Whalen said upwards of 6,500 attended the New Year’s Eve celebration at the plaza outside the Avenir Centre.
“It’s a night I think that we’ll be able to duplicate going forward, I think it will be an annual event here in Moncton,” Whalen said.
Pumphouse Brew Pub manager Kevin Parker told Global News in an interview the games brought a lot of business during a normally slow time of year.
The pub is located a stone’s throw from the Avenir centre, just off Main street.
‘I’m missing the crowd today!” he said.
“It was hard to grow accustomed to the 2:45 rush and stuff like that so took us a couple of days to get our bearings but once we did so we had a great week,” he said.
Whalen said that while he’s waiting for the results of a full economic analysis, he thinks the province and the city will see a large return on their joint $2-million investment.
“The expectation was that it would be between 10 and 20 million dollars and I think based on what I saw we’ll be on the higher end of that,” he said.
A full response will be presented to city council within the next few weeks.