Nashville area loses two hockey rinks with facility's sudden closing
Just a few days after the city of Nashville hosted a successful NHL All-Star weekend, the area could lose one of its top youth hockey facilities.
On Thursday morning, A-Game Sportsplex – a twin rinks facility in Nashville’s southern suburb of Franklin – closed swiftly with police blocking people coming to the rinks for different sporting events. This knocks down the total of public use Nashville-area ice sheets from six to four.
Wrote Rinkside Report:
Including A-Game, there are only six sheets of ice in Nashville that can be used for youth and adult hockey. There isn’t a lot of available ice time at any of these six as it is. Closing A-Game and taking two sheets of ice away in Nashville will be devastating to a market that was on such a high after this past weekend’s All-Star game festivities. Just building a new rink is something that can’t occur quickly.
The Predators practice at Centennial Sportsplex in Nashville. There are also two rinks located in Antioch, Tennessee – a facility that was built in conjunction with the Predators and the city.
Owners of A-Game wanted to close it since it was losing money. In late December the groups that run the hockey and volleyball programs at A-Game filed an injunction, asking the building stay open.
On Feb. 2, a circuit court judge stopped the injunction, citing it would do further harm to the facility. According to Nashville Business Journal, the building’s owners had a $16 million purchase contract with Cincinnati-based developer AL. Neyer, which would have turned the building into 175,000 square feet of office space.
The current owners of A-Game bought the complex in 2008. They said the building, which is used for other sports such as volleyball, averages a $72,000 shortfall per-month.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman praised the growth of hockey in Nashville during All-Star weekend. This was before the sudden closing of A-Game.
“Hockey here has grown exponentially at all levels. There's three times as many sheets of ice as when Predators got here,” Bettman said. “There are more high school teams than ever before. And hockey registration has quadrupled in size. USA Hockey recently announced that there are in excess of 100,000 players in the 8-and- under age class, and that's sustaining participation that outpaces growth in the U.S. for virtually every sport, according to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association. And interestingly enough, USA Hockey said that the 100,000th player to register actually did so at the Ford Center in Antioch.”
During the 2012 NHL lockout the Predators who remained in town, used A-Game Sportsplex as home base. The team also sometimes holds practices at the complex for fans in the area. A large portion of Predators’ season ticket holders are based in the Franklin area.
According to USA Hockey, there are 3,449 registered hockey players in the state of Tennessee.
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Josh Cooper is an editor for Puck Daddy on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @joshuacooper
