The Ashcroft Curling Club was formed in 1896 by a small group of enthusiastic curlers. The first curling games were held in an outside rink.
Located immediately adjacent to the Drylands Arena, the Curling Club building is owned by the Village of Ashcroft, but operated by the Ashcroft and District Curling Club. There are four sheets of ice with the season beginning in mid-October and continuing through early March. The curling club offers adult league curling, senior league curling and junior league curling.
In latter years the club has experienced ever more difficulties in its efforts to continue in operation, most of the difficulties stemming from declining membership and declining revenues. A lengthy
Ashcroft Cache Creek Journal news article, the beginning of which is quoted below, outlines the club's difficulties as of 2017. Unfortunately, two years later the club was forced to
dispense with the 2019 season while renovations and upgrades were accomplished, but has recovered and curls on...
Ashcroft Curling Club battling to keep the doors open
Dwindling membership means this year’s season is in jeopardy.
Ken Alexander | Oct. 10, 2017
The Ashcroft & District Curling Club is between a rock and a hard place.
It is in danger of closing this coming season unless people start signing up to curl for 2017–18.
Club secretary Janet Quesnel says they need the curlers’ annual dues to help pay for the operation of the rink. “We’re fighting to get people back to curl.”
She says they had to close the club’s doors in 2006 because of a roof issue, and water was leaking through it.
“The rink is owned by the Village of Ashcroft and it has always paid for the repairs and the like. So we went to them and said ‘It’s your building so you have to fix it.’ Between the two of us, we figured where we stood.”
Quesnel says the Village fixed the roof in 2006. “Unfortunately, in the year [the Village] was dealing with this, nobody went in and opened up the fans and stuff, so when we went in to start the ice plant, we discovered we had black mould. We had to close down for another six months to get the mould out.
“So in that 18 months we were closed, we lost a lot of membership through people aging and others finding other things to do during the winter.
“We have been fighting dropping membership and trying to get people back into curling. It’s a good sport; you can do it until you’re really, really old.”
Meanwhile, the executive has kept the club going by renting out the rink to a tree planting company that was keeping its seedlings cool there during the summer planting season when the rink was closed and not in use.
“That rent has basically kept our club operating in the last three years. They paid us so much per seedling, and paid all of the hydro and gas while they were using the building. That gave us the money to restart every year.”
Unfortunately, the company didn’t come back this year, Quesnel explains.
“So now we’re looking for money and trying to get people to come back to curl. We are also applying for grants.”
From the Ashcroft Cache Creek Journal