Orgininally published in https://tj.news/
If you haven’t been to the New Brunswick Sports Hall of Fame lately, you’re in for a big surprise.
Although the hall and museum in-downtown Fredericton has lost “about 90 per cent” of foot traffic due to the COVID-19 pandemic, executive director Jamie Wolverton says the downtime has been beneficial in another way.
The Building Inspiration legacy project, set up to coincide with the sports shrine’s 50th anniversary, is now complete.
“It’s fabulous to see it finished,” Wolverton said.
The centrepiece of the improvements is a SO-seat theatre and presentation space on the third floor to facilitate video screenings, seminars, presentations and special events.
“We’ve already got an event booked for the end of the month,” Wolverton said. “We’ll still have to have physical distancing in place, but it’s great to see things start to open up a bit. We’re anxious to start leveraging the space when we get back to whatever the new normal is.”
The Alden R. Clark Theatre, named after a hall of fame member, has nine TV screens mounted on the wall. Together, they can form one large, 12 foot by 7 foot screen.
“For the last piece of our fundraising campaign, we developed a seat sponsorship,” Wolverton said. “We reached out to honoured members and supporters and asked them to contribute $500 to sponsor one of the remaining 40 seats that weren’t spoken for.”
The J. T Clark Family Foundation matched each donation.
“So essentially they turned that into $1,000 per seat,” he said, “and we were able to raise an additional $40,000.”
The hallway next to the theatre has framed portraits of 18 of the 250 enshrined members.
The second floor features a ‘New Brunswick’s First” wall, with bilingual plaques recognizing achievements, and a display case nearby with artifacts of some men and women who are part of the ‘firsts’ accomplishments.
“Records change all the time, but the very first person to achieve something can’t be outdone,” Wolverton said.
A large display for the newest members of the sports hall has been moved to the main floor, next to the entrance.
The sports hall’s website has added a 3D virtual tour, “so you can feel like you’re walking through the building from home,” Wolverton said. “You can zoom in and read the writing on all the plaques, or zoom back out and see the layout like a dollhouse.”
By next summer, Wolverton hopes to “redo the virtual sports system, so we’ll have cutting-edge technology to keep the virtual sports enthusiasts even more engaged when they’re here.”
The 2020 hall of fame induction ceremony was postponed until 2021. It will be held April 24 at the Fredericton Convention Centre.
The latest inductees will be armwrestler Joyce King of Lower Hainesville, Miramichi basketball player and coach Pauline Lordon, UNB men’s hockey coach Gardiner MacDougall of New Maryland, golfer Kathy Meagher of Fredericton, paranordic skier and Shippagan native Louis Fortin and the Fredericton-based Wayne Tallon curling rink.
