A new era begins this week for the Winkler Centennial Arena.
Workers are putting the finishing touches on the massive $23.75 million renovation project ahead of opening it to the public just in time for the Winkler Flyers junior hockey team’s final home games of the regular season Friday and Saturday night.
The main entrance is now on the south side of the facility, which is connected to the Meridian Exhibition Centre
The Park St. facility officially got its occupancy permit last Friday, and city council celebrated with a tour of the revitalized space.
Over the past year, the rink was completely gutted and transformed into a facility that will serve the community well for generations to come, observed Mayor Henry Siemens.
“We took a rink that was 55+ years old and we’ve turned it into a new, modern rink, adding several hundred seats,” he said. The arena now seats about 1,350 people with room for 200 or so more in designated standing areas.
“We have an opportunity now for a significant amount of standing room seats and we’ve worked hard to make those comfortable,” Siemens said, explaining there are railings in those areas that people can lean up against.
The layout of the space is something new as well.
“Probably the biggest piece that people will notice is that you’re going to walk from the top down to your seat, whereas previously you walked up to your seat,” Siemens noted.
The top-down bowl design allows for not just more seats but better sight lines while still keeping fans close to the action.
“There were a lot of really good things that we liked in the old rink, like the fact that we were fairly on top of the ice, that our fans could be close,” the mayor noted. “We worked hard to recreate that.”
There’s plenty of traditional bench seating but also new individual seats in select areas. There are also several VIP boxes overlooking all the action.
“We did have box seating in the old arena but it wasn’t quite as nice as this,” Siemens said. “What this does is allow both the Winkler Flyers and other user groups an opportunity to provide a slightly different experience for fans.”
The renos also moved the entrance to the south side of the building, added spacious new dressing rooms, moved the canteen upstairs, and brought aging mechanical and electrical systems up to modern standards.
Also added was a giant electronic scoreboard at centre ice that will provide a host of advertising and playback opportunities.
“Let’s say the Flyers go very deep in the playoffs—we could literally broadcast away games in here,” said Siemens. “The Jets, the Olympics, we can do watch parties here now. We have a high quality screen that allows us to do all that.”
The project came in under budget and on schedule.
“If we look back at our schedule in October 2024, we tentatively planned to play hockey in this arena by the end of February 2026,” Siemens noted. “We’re within six days of that. To have a year and a half of planning and construction and be within a week of the anticipated time, we’re extremely proud of that and thankful to Bockstael Construction and our staff who have managed this entire project exceptionally well.
“We also want to say a huge thank you to all of our user groups about how patient they’ve been, how well they’ve worked together to make use of a much smaller arena for the better part of two years now,” Siemens added. Winkler’s lone rink in that time was in the Meridian Exhibition Centre. “It really was very inconvenient for a lot of them, but they all recognized that this is what we were working towards.”
Deputy Mayor Andrew Froese, who heads up council’s community services committee, said the renovations went incredibly smoothly considering the age of the building.
“Usually you find all kinds of surprises—and we did find asbestos in places we didn’t expect,” he said, noting, however, that the bones of the facility were still solid and the builders and city staff “did a fantastic job of jumping to every problem, finding solutions, and finding ways to stay on track” when curve balls did come up.
“I’m very excited to show this to the community,” he said. “I’m excited to hear the atmosphere in here and see what kind of life it brings to the Flyers and to the whole community, what kind of buzz it creates.”
The City officially got the keys to the rink last Friday morning, though there was still a handful of work left to be completed.
“We’re not 100 per cent done with a few things, but we can still be in here playing hockey, we can finish out our hockey season,” Siemens said. “And there’ll probably be a few things that we’re going to learn over this next month, month and a half that will allow us to set everything up properly to finish it up and get ready for the next hockey season and the grand opening.”
An open house is in the works, likely for March 12, to give people the opportunity to get behind-the-scenes tours of the entire rink, but the official ribbon cutting celebration won’t take place until fall.
