As you are no doubt aware, Murrayfield has announced that it will be
closed for Curling until January 2021 - see their notice, below.
Further news will appear on this website regarding Province Competitions and the curling rink, when the information comes to hand.
Murrayfield Curling Limited
Edinburgh Curling Club
It
is with considerable regret that we, Murrayfield Curling Ltd, after
consultation with Edinburgh Curling Club, have made the decision to
suspend curling at Murrayfield until the end of December.
This
decision became inevitable after full consideration of the details
emanating from the Scottish Government’s announcement on Thursday 29th
October.
For
some weeks, we have been awaiting the outcome of lobbying of the
Scottish Government by Scottish Curling with the assistance of SIRA
(Scottish Ice Rink Association) to classify us as an indoor individual
exercise activity, given the extensive efforts that we, along with all
curling rinks in Scotland, have introduced to create as safe an
environment as that required for individual adult exercise in gyms. To
date we have not been successful and as result of the requirements of
the Government’s Tier 3 conditions we as a sport are limited to group
exercise for under 18s only. It is unfortunate for those members below
the age of 18 that they are denied access, because self evidently the
economics of running an ice rink for that age group only, are not
sustainable.
Despite
the hope that Edinburgh City, at the date of the next review on 9th
November, may be reclassified as a Tier 2 local authority, which would
remove the above over 18s restriction, there is no guarantee of that
being the outcome. In any event, when taken along with the fact that
travel from other local authority areas that we draw our membership
from, with a higher Tier status, would not be allowed, it becomes
enormously uncertain how many of our members would actually be able to
curl. Waiting to see if matters would improve whilst continuing to incur
costly levels of expenditure to maintain the ice is not a viable option
and so we felt we had no option but to take the above decision.
Over
the coming weeks, we will be evaluating the evolving situation with the
possibility to start curling in January 2021 and we will advise you of
our plans nearer that date. Those plans will be influenced by the
willingness of Clubs to attempt to reschedule games already lost (and to
be lost between now and December) and our ability to find ice times to
match demand. We will be in touch with club secretaries over the coming
days to discuss how they wish to proceed.
