We are in the heart of winter. The time when the days seem shorter and nights longer. One of the few things that makes winter bearable in Minnesota is the frozen lakes for pond hockey, ice fishing and let’s not forget about cross-country skiing.

When we think back to the end of the 2013-2014 school year when us students at the time received an email from HUSC asking about how we felt about an outdoor sport court on campus, many of us couldn’t help but think it sounded like a pretty good idea. HUSC spent $25,000 on the new sport court that would allow students access to basketball and volleyball in the fall and spring. For the winter months, the court was to be transformed into an ice rink. Well, students can play basketball and volleyball in the non-winter months but the ice rink is a different story.

We all can remember last year’s debacle regarding the ice rink that wasn’t really an ice rink. It was more of a hard puddle that was just too thin to actually have ice skates on. If the facts are correct, we believe that this particular ice puddle was used only twice for broomball games. For the remainder of the long winter, the Mulken Sport Court laid barren with some half frozen water sitting in the middle of it while the court was under lock and key for no student to enter.

Fast forward to this year. Fall classes began and so too did the pickup basketball games. Until the dead of winter hit and the snow settled in. One would expect that the failure of last year’s ice rink would be followed up by a new plan on how to get an ice rink functional on campus. We are disappointed that this year has been a letdown. One game of broomball in January is all that was put on in the Mulken Sport Court. No ice rink is formed and now the court stays empty and collects more snow until it melts in mid-April.

Sure, there are probably some liability issues when it comes to using the ice rink 24/7. Regardless, one would think that we would have a functional ice rink after HUSC and the administration promised we would on a semi-regular basis. Otherwise, what did we support paying for?

So the question persists, why have an outdoor basketball court that is only used for four months out of the year? We at The Oracle cannot give you the answer to this question, but perhaps that would be a good question to ask HUSC or the admintistration.

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