If you want to be known as a hockey city, you need two things – rabid fans for the big local team and the facilities to grow the game from the grassroots level.

Winnipeg can check off the first one with ease, as the Jets’ home rink is sold out for the next two years. The second one? Not so much. Although the city is teeming with neighbourhood arenas, the majority were built a half-century ago and are past – well past, in many cases – their best-before date.

The 15 or so city-owned facilities, many of which have poor seating, co-ed washrooms, cramped dressing rooms and, in some cases, ice surfaces that are 15 feet shorter than they should be. (That makes for an extremely small neutral zone.)

But while the arena situation is on the docket at Winnipeg’s city council, there’s very little money that could be earmarked to upgrade these facilities or, better yet, replace them. In the past couple of years, the private sector has stepped up and constructed a small number of multiplexes featuring two or more rinks. The highest-profile example is the MTS Iceplex, a four-arena facility owned by the Chipman family that serves as the practice rink for the Jets.

But it’s going to take more than millionaire owners of a professional team to fix things. The Corydon Community Centre (CCC), led by Pat O’Connor, is hoping be part of the solution. The CCC board wants to use the Iceplex blueprint and replace what is arguably the most rundown rink in town – the Charles A. Barbour Arena.

O’Connor is widely known in local financial services circles as the founder and president of Blackwood Wealth Planning. The CCC already has three community centres under its umbrella and it’s hoping to add Barbour by buying it from the City for $1, then building a “twinplex” to replace it. The cost has been ballparked at $15 million and would be funded through a combination of public and private money.

If the CCC was a pure for-profit enterprise, O’Connor says, the board would probably be looking at a building with four rinks, but he’s conscious of the need to maintain as much green space as possible. The proposed facility would be built on what is now a “mini-soccer pitch” adjacent to the current rink, which is used by Winnipeg South End United for competitive teams of 10- to 12-year-olds. O’Connor says the CCC proposal also would incorporate a programmable area for seniors, making sure to avoid duplication of services available at the nearby Pan Am Pool.

“When you build a twin rink,” O’Connor says, “there’s extra space that can be created for potential revenue-generating programs that would help us cover costs.”

The city originally put out a call to community groups and private businesses interested in building new ice-skating multiplexes or adding ice sheets to existing facilities in October 2011. That request for proposals yielded eight responses, all of which were rejected.

Two of the proposals were deemed worthy of further discussion, but the city has not identified them.

Mayor Sam Katz says a couple of other arena-development groups are ahead of the CCC, which certainly seems like a nice problem to have.

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