Officials at the Labatt Blue Buffalo Pond Hockey Tournament cancelled play for today due to unsafe ice conditions.
"Continuous snowfall, slushy ice conditions, standing water and a weather forecast with temperatures in the mid 30s, made for unsafe, unplayable ice conditions," said City of Buffalo Commissioner Steve Stepniak, Public Works. "The guys worked so hard over the last few weeks to pull this tournament off. They see the value of it for the City of Buffalo. If there was any way to get that ice ready for today, they would have done it. Unfortunately - Mother Nature served up an impossible scenario."
Team captains were notified immediately by Performax Hockey Systems, which managed tournament play. Teams will be given the option of a prorated refund or merchandise.
"Our first priority is safety. The City of Buffalo Public Works department put out an unbelievable effort to get the ice ready today, " said Ryan Daley, associate brand manager of Labatt Blue. "We're disappointed that we can't get the players on the ice but we made the right decision today.
"It's really important to us that we do the right thing for the players," said Daley. "This tournament will always be at the mercy of the elements, but we wanted to make an extra effort to take care of the teams for getting down here and playing through tough conditions yesterday."
For information on the tournament go to: www.performaxhockey.com or Facebook.
Images courtesy of Glenn E. Murray, Esq.
In future years, might there be a fallback to some indoor rinks? I understand the cool part of this is playing on the lake, but if we're to have teams travel from as far as Texas, seems like we might at least garuntee them some games.
You could split an indoor rink in thirds, and play 90 degrees to a normal game.
Late Saturday you could see the conditions deteriorate, but the atmosphere and the snowfall (which didn't help the slush buildup) made it a great show for the observers. Not sure how the players felt about it. Again I understand that the roots of this event have it played outdoors, but if one year out of four you had to venture inside, it seems like it would strengthen the overall event during the years you could get outside.