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Steed and Evans consolidates operations in Heidelberg.............................»13 THE OBSERVER | Saturday, January 24, 2009
Displaying our passion for hockey
»18-22 VOLUME 14, ISSUE 03
SATURDAY, JANUARY 24, 2009
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RALLYING AROUND THE CAUSE For 26 hours last weekend, elmira was teeming with energetic hockey fans supporting Woolwich’s bid to make the top five list for cBc’s Kraft hockeyville contest. one finalist will be announced photo | marc miquel helsen weekly, starting with sunday’s all-star Game.
Hockeyville contest becomes a waiting game Voting was fast and furious, now Woolwich awaits results that will trickle out over the next month JONI MILTENBURG After a marathon day of hockey and a weekend blitz of voting, Woolwich residents are waiting to see if their efforts will be rewarded with a spot in Hockeyville’s top five communities. Woolwich could know as soon as Sunday or as late as Feb. 21 whether it made the top five. The first finalist will be announced during the NHL allstar game Jan. 25, and another finalist will be announced on
consecutive Saturdays after that. “I think it’s already been decided but I have no idea whether we did it or we didn’t,” said Graham Snyder, who’s spearheading the Hockeyville entry. “I’ll just keep on with the positive thinking.” Snyder was happy with the turnout for last week’s hockey day that saw minor hockey players, hockey families, Mennonite players and Sugar Kings alumni take to the ice. He guessed that more than 800 people laced up their skates
over the 26 hours, and hundreds more were in the stands watching. Snyder was at the rink with a phone in one hand and a Blackberry in the other, voting as often as he could. Along with learning how to multitask, Snyder and his family discovered text messaging is the most efficient of the three methods. “You can do it continuously; you just have to make sure you’ve got a plan that it’s not going to cost you hundreds of dollars to do it.”
“I know on the Blackberry we probably got close to the 10,000 [texts] that our plan allowed for. We did lots of phoning and lots of online too.” Hockeyville spokesperson Jessica Hanick said she didn’t have the final tally on how many votes were cast, but they topped last year’s total. Last year more than 1.7 million votes were cast in deciding the top five. At Park Manor Public School, phys-ed teacher Ken Lubert had his health classes add their votes.
“We thought it might be healthy for Woolwich to be Hockeyville, so we took the whole class down to the computer lab and they spent the whole period voting … I believe some of the other teachers found some curriculum ties as well. So we should have had several thousands votes from our school.” Region of Waterloo employees who logged on to the employee portal found information and links on where to vote on the login page. ReSee VOTE page »02
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