The Bruno Artificial Ice Committee held a barbecue and car bingo fundraiser Monday evening for a new artificial ice rink in the town. A total of 75 cars brought around 220 people to play. Here are a few people with their thoughts on why the project is important for the town.

Jenna Hale, organizer and town councillor: Our Number One reason for having the artificial ice inside the rink is keeping sports local. We really want to help people play sports in Bruno instead of driving to the big cities to play sports. Our rink is the busiest place in the winter - you always see tons of people there watching, cheering or maybe even just coming to eat a burger. We’re very lucky to have over 250 athletes that play sports in our rink. They play anything from figure skating, broomball, hockey, rec hockey to sledge hockey.”

Kurtis Ellis, minor hockey coach: “We have 27 kids in pre-novice hockey and next year we’ll have a novice team and an initiation team. Being able to play here for an extra two months of the season would give them that advantage to catch up to all the communities around here that get started two months before us. We always kind of play catch-up at the beginning of the year because we haven’t been on the ice as much as everybody else.”

Ray Bender, coach of the junior and senior Axemen broomball teams: Natural ice, it’s a tough situation. For a prime example, last year our senior Axemen team had three practices booked for the month of December; lots of our players live in the city, and out of the three practices twice there was water on the ice and we couldn't practice properly, and the other time we had to cancel.”

Jadyn Borstmayer, member of two broomball teams: “Broomball is all about ball control. You can run as fast as you can or be as slow as you are, but it doesn’t matter if you can stickhandle around everyone and control the ball. My dad is old and he can still beat me on the ice because he just has so much more ball control than I do. And when the ice is not melting, you have so much more time to take a look and control the ball rather than just sliding around everywhere.”

Daryl LePage, deputy mayor: “It’s going to be really nice for us to have this. Not many small communities have artificial ice and we’re hoping by getting this that we’ll be able to bring in more teams and more funding for the town and hopefully promote the sports of hockey, sledge hockey and broomball.”

The Bruno campaign is one of the entries in The Great 8 competition presented by Nutrien Lanigan, Bolt FM & Discover Humboldt.

Learn about the other entries here. Voting begins in August.

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Jill Tegekempe, left, Lucille Tagekempe and Marion Krentz enjoy some Bingo in Bruno.