WE'VE BEEN BUSY THIS YEAR!
Greetings everyone! As this is the very first update I'm publicly providing on the current status of our Dedicated Ice Project, I want to let you know that we have been working on this for quite some time behind the scenes! There have been a lot of truly hard working participants going through a lot of work, research, and outreach, and up until recently I didnt want to get ahead of myself and start enthusiastically declaring our plans without having one fully in place.
But given that we have been working on this for a while, where do I even start? If you want information about what we intend to do, I encourage you to read the main post to get a better idea of what we have in store. There have been months of work, and I know I will forget so many things. Let me give a brief overview of what we have done, and then a general timeline as to when things were completed.
Over the last 8 months, the Curl Troy board, along with many other members and volunteers have set out to organize and position ourselves to best transition from an arena curling club into a club curling on dedicated ice. We finalized our business plan, worked daily on financial projections, thought through fundraising ideas, planned events, worked on pitch presentations, talked with architects, hired a wonderful realtor to help our search and we even toured a number of buildings. In fact, we were so close to an agreement with a location in Huber Heights, that we thought we might have to scramble to release all of this information and be ready to curl by January 2027. In hindsight, that is very pie in the sky, but given the pace we were moving at, I felt confident we could organize enough resources to make that happen. As it turns out, it did not happen, but that's ok. Trials and tribulations will occur, but we will keep moving forward, because we have all of the pieces in place to execute when we find the space that works for us.
Since then, we have toured two additional spaces, and continue to be on the lookout for others, and while that perfect spot may not yet have presented itself, new opportunities seem to come up weekly. It is really only a matter of time before it's found. So what have we done since the beginning of the year? Well the scope is large, and I am sure I will not remember it all, but so you understand the dedication we have committed to making dedicated curling happen in Dayton, let me run through things for you as brief as I can.