Women’s and men’s hockey teams from across the Ottawa Valley flooded the Fort-Coulonge arena over the weekend for a two-day fundraiser tournament for the facility as well as the Comets minor hockey league.
A packed schedule saw four women’s and five men’s squads face off in games that began first thing Friday morning and ran until the final hours of Saturday night.
In the men’s division, hometown Fort-Coulonge Dirty Dogs emerged champions, donating their winnings back to the arena and minor hockey teams. In the women’s division the Dusters, with players from Gatineau and the Ottawa Valley, claimed victory, beating out teams from Petawawa, Renfrew, and local Pontiac Meteors.
Christine Bourque, vice-president of the volunteer committee that runs the arena, said it has hosted many a fundraiser tournament in the past, but never this close to the holiday break.
“We thought we could sneak something in post-New Years and before people went back to work and school,” she said, noting a Friday night karaoke party was organized on top of the tournament to bring in some extra funds.
“There aren’t a lot of bars in town here or a lot of things to do on a Friday night so it’s a way for us to offer a service, a fun thing so people can come out and do something, and at the same time it funds the repairs and upgrades for the arena, so it’s win win.”
The tournament and karaoke party are just two examples of the many social events the committee has hosted as fundraisers over the past year to support recent renovations, efforts which have enabled the arena to get back in the green after some challenging years.
At the arena committee’s annual general meeting on Dec. 28, it presented a positive financial report for 2025, with a surplus of $37,061, up $53,744 from the 2024 deficit of $16,683.
According to Bourque, this is the first surplus it has reported in recent memory, possible thanks to increased ice rentals, fundraising, community donations, and selling more ad spots in the arena.
This is quite the feat, given the major repairs the arena has taken on in recent years.
“We’ve done a lot of work over the last couple of years, the big ticket items like the entire refrigeration system and this past summer it was the boards. So those are the big expensive projects and luckily for our arena is that we’ve now gone past that,” Bourque said.
“So we’re in good shape, we’re doing well, we’re happy with what we’ve got done and we’re going to carry on because there’s probably 30 years of work that was put aside because there was never the will or the money to get the repairs done.”
Bourque also attributes part of the arena’s financial success to the committee’s focus on growing its social media audience.
“Our Facebook follower numbers have gone through the roof, and our viewings have gone through the roof, and I don’t think we can overestimate how important that’s been to the extra rentals that we got and people feeling more ownership over the arena,” she said.
She believes this online growth has helped bring in support from more local businesses and increase ice rentals, which she said went up by seven hours a week in 2025.
“And we’ve improved that since September. This is the most amount of ice rentals we’ve had in probably a decade,” Bourque said.
She said ice rentals alone will never be able to keep an arena above water, even if the ice was fully booked for the season, but that every little bit helps.
As of Monday afternoon Bourque said the final amount raised by the tournament had yet to be calculated.
