April 7 2015
Thank you thank youthank you………… To all of you who put forth yourtime and efforts voting and supporting Haliburton for the title ofHockeyville 2015. Your support is sincerely appreciated by all of us who were working on this. Although we didn’t make it into the finals wehave much to be proud of getting as far as we did and at least earning$25000 for our arena which will allow the municipality to completefurther important improvements to the arena’s efficiency. I rathersuspected that Chatham Kent would be the entry to beat when the Top 10were announced. Not only are they a much larger centre than ours buttheir arena also hosts a junior B team which would add greatly to their devoted fan base. Also worth noting was that they were identifiedtheir town with their county of Kent. If we had tried that we wouldhave to call ourselves “Haliburton Haliburton” which would have beenrather confusing. Having said that I find myself coming back to theissue of fragmented support in our community for such efforts such asthis that Charlie Teljeur talked about recently in an editorial piece.This “fragmenting” of support was evident in this latest effort and Ihave no way of knowing if it would have made a difference but I do know it was a factor. We can’t hope to get past the disadvantage of havingsuch a small population base without all working together as a team! The Highland Storm Pee Wee Hockey Team just won an all Ontario OMHAchampionship on Saturday afternoon. Those 12-year-old athletes are fromall around the county and they worked their magic together as a team toaccomplish this distinction and I applaud them for it. All Ontariochampionships don’t come often and certainly don’t come without a greatdeal of teamwork all season long! We adults could take away a goodlesson in teamwork from their success. Finally I want to acknowledgeTamara Wilbee and her extended team for their exceptional effort in this exciting endeavour. I was very proud and pleased that the Hockeyvillejudges chose to put my name and words on their website as the nominatorbut the heavy lifting and the original nomination plus the majorpromotion was done out of Tamara’s office and we wouldn’t really havegotten off the ground without their involvement. Thanks again to all ofyou. It’s been quite a ride.
Bob Stinson
Haliburton
