Waterloo to host inaugural Canadian Basketball League team
First league games slated for December, 2015
Come December, the Waterloo Memorial Recreational Complex will be home to a team in the inaugural season of the newly-formed Canadian Basketball League.
Waterloo will also host the league headquarters and its administrative offices, Butch Carter, president of the CBL told CBC Radio's The Morning Edition.
The first season is scheduled to begin on Dec. 11, Carter said, with the first Waterloo home game on Dec. 18. The league plans to schedule games on Boxing Day, New Year's Eve and Family Day, 2016.
Carter said he'd been talking with Waterloo officials for the past "eight or nine months" about bringing the league's first team to the city. The league's other three pioneer teams are:
- Hamilton, which will play at Mohawk College.
- Ottawa, which will play at the Carleton University gym.
- Scarborough, which will play in the new Pan-Am Centre.
Upgrades needed
The City of Waterloo will be spending close to half a million dollars to upgrade the facility. Most of that money will be spent on changing the ice rink boards and arena glass eight years ahead of its scheduled maintenance at the Recreation Complex, said Steve Scherrer, manager of facilties for the City of Waterloo.
Although the changes will be made long ahead of schedule, enabling the boards and glass to be removed and re-installed more quickly to accommodate the basketball court and premium court-side seating, Scherrer said, the city would not be losing money in the enterprise.
"The return on investment in our first year is actually quite small but it's still cash-positive, in a surplus-style method," Scherrer said. "We've done our due diligence to ensure that we're not losing money on the project. And then after a six-year period it actually starts to ramp up," he said.
"We're not an owner," Scherrer said. But it takes an "informal partnership" to make it work, he added.
Why Waterloo?
"We settled on the Waterloo Rec centre because we could play all of our games on the weekends and we would not interfere with what was going on at the Aud with the Rangers," Carter said.
Waterloo Region fits the formula for semi-professional leagues, said Carter, one-time coach ot the Toronto Raptors. He said the equation for success includes:
- Distance from a metropolitan area
- Population over 400,000
- Demographic of higher-educated,higher-income
"The long, successful history of the Kitchener Rangers... as far as a business, it's very successful," Carter said.
"The biggest issue in an ice arena is the changeover of the glass," Carter explained, and the ability to take the glass in and out more quickly will allow the city to use the venue for more events.
"I believe the indirect return to the city is far greater than the direct return because we're only in there 14 nights and it's available [for other use] for 250 nights," Carter added.
Scherrer said CBL use of the Recreational Complex would not interfere with use already planned for the fall and winter of 2015-2016, such as Laurier University varsity hockey, Waterloo minor hockey and girls' hockey.