From bodychecks to sound checks Canada Life Centre transforms quickly from hosting NHL action, to staging sellout concerts, and back again — often in the space of a day or two By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 12:00 PM CST Friday, Nov. 15, 2024

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This article was published 15/11/2024 (672 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s Wednesday night, and a roaring sold-out crowd has just heard the words they’ve been waiting — years, decades, a lifetime — to hear: “Winnipeg, it’s about time.”

The Boss, Bruce Spingsteen, is finally on stage at Canada Life Centre, playing the city for the first time.

Every concert is a production, even ones with a seemingly spartan setup like Springsteen’s. With the band and the lights and the energy of 15,000 fans, it’s hard to believe that less than 24 hours ago, this packed room was an empty hockey arena.

The history-making Springsteen show falls in the middle of what has been a particularly busy week at Canada Life Centre, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this weekend.

The Winnipeg Jets played the Dallas Stars last Saturday, followed by the service for the late Justice Murray Sinclair on Sunday.

Then you have the concert event of the year (or ever, depending on whom you ask) on Wednesday, followed by six Disney on Ice shows beginning Friday and running through Sunday before the Jets take on the Florida Panthers on Tuesday.

When you attend these events, you might not think of all the people — and all the work — required to transform the facility into everything it needs to be, whether that’s a hockey arena, a concert venue, a basketball court or a monster truck pit.

It’s this work that’s allowed the facility to be booked and busy for its 20 years of existence. The downtown venue then known as the MTS Centre held its first concert on Nov. 16, 2004 — a grand-opening showcase called Northern Lights, Northern Stars featuring such Manitoba artists as Burton Cummings, Randy Bachman, Tom Cochrane, Doc Walker and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra.

Since then, it has hosted more than 2,500 events, hockey games included. It hit another milestone on Oct. 18, when the 20-millionth guest walked through the doors for the Jets game versus the San Jose Sharks.

And Ed Meichsner has been here since Day One.

Meichsner is the vice-president of facilities operations for True North Sports and Entertainment, which owns and operates Canada Life Centre. A lot goes on behind the scenes when it comes to running a building like this, he says.

“You’re bringing in 15,000 people a night, and the building needs to be cleaned and repaired and maintained so it’s ready to go and safe for the patrons the next evening as well.”

It’s a nimble, multi-purpose entertainment facility by design, Meichsner says.

“We have retractable bleachers to increase floor space. We have a lot of capacity in our roofing grid for hanging really heavy concerts and shows. We have a lot of power in the building, like 3,000 amps of power, so we can accommodate any touring show that comes into the building.”

Of course, Canada Life Centre is also the home of your Winnipeg Jets. The arena boasts some of the best ice in the NHL — Top 3 best in the league, Meichsner says.

Obviously, it takes a lot of work to maintain ice that nice. So what happens to it during concerts?

“A lot of people still ask me that question,” Meichsner says with a laugh.

The short answer is, the ice gets covered. The long answer is way more interesting.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at what’s involved in converting Canada Life Centre from a hockey barn into a concert venue.

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In Disney’s 1951 animated classic Alice in Wonderland, there’s a scene in which the playing-card soldiers are painting the roses red for the Queen of Hearts.

In Canada Life Centre bright and early on Monday morning, building engineers and ice technicians David Wright and Ryan Jones are painting the ice white for Disney on Ice.

“Some people still don’t believe that when I tell them we paint the ice,” Meichsner says. “Ice is not white like that.”

It’s quiet in the arena, as Wright and Jones spray a fine mist of quick-freezing paint over the rink, first erasing the blue lines — those are the hardest to cover — and the on-ice logos to create a uniform sheet of white for Mickey and the gang to skate on. It’s oddly meditative. The new white paint makes the hockey ice look grey by comparison.

The ice has to be prepared today, Remembrance Day. Not long after the Springsteen tour rolls out in the small hours of Thursday morning — which is called “taillights” on the crew’s schedule, as in the taillights of the departing trucks — Disney on Ice will roll in for this weekend’s run of shows.

But figure skaters require more than just a blank white canvas. They have different ice requirements than hockey.

“We’re going to go a little bit warmer on the sheet because of the jumping and the picks that hit the ice — hockey is a little colder (between -5 C and -6 C to be precise),” Wright says. “And then what we’ll do is we’ll build the ice up thicker too, to accommodate the picks on the figure skates.”

To truly understand the investment in protecting and maintaining the ice, one must understand the meticulous, time-consuming process that is making the ice.

It all starts with a floor you could practically eat off of.

“If you have anything on the floor, like a piece of gum or a scuff mark from a shoe, now you’ve got a separation between the refrigerated concrete floor and your ice,” Meichsner says.

And that’s no good; all those seemingly tiny things will create big issues in terms of ice quality later on.

High-quality ice begins with high-quality water — 15,000 gallons of it, from start to finish. Wright and his team will monitor everything from temperature to TDS (total dissolved solids) levels; higher TDS levels yield lower-quality ice. City water is used, but it goes through a reverse osmosis treatment to reduce the TDS to 125-140 parts per million, the sweet spot for ideal ice.

“We spend a lot of attention having just the right quality of water to build the ice,” Wright says.

They also take their time installing it, which usually happens sometime in September. (The ice comes out as soon as the hockey season is over.)

“We never rush the ice install,” Meichsner says. “Our event calendar is very aggressive, but whenever we do our ice install, we always book three days.”

The boards and glass go in first, which helps control airflow over the ice surface. Unlike community rinks which are flooded with a hose, the ice at Canada Life Centre is built out of multiple thin layers of fine spray. “You get a much stronger, higher quality sheet,” Wright says.

Back in the day, Wright would have to hand-paint all the logos, including the team logo at centre ice.

“We would take a projector and make a print on some brown paper, perforate it, and then come out with chalk and do the outline, and then hand paint it all,” he says.

“Now it’s all textiles, which makes things so much easier.”

After Disney on Ice ends on Sunday, the rink will be shaved back down to NHL level — about 1.5-inches thick — in time for the Jets game on Nov. 19. And those rocking out in the pit for Springsteen won’t notice, but owing to the figure-skating requirements, the floor is sitting half an inch higher than usual.

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It’s 11:59 p.m. on Tuesday, and men in hardhats stride out onto the ice. They’ve just had their shift safety briefing, and now it’s go time.

This is the conversion team.

Sheldon Maytwayashing is the lead conversion supervisor. “I thought this was going to be a nice temporary job,” he says with a chuckle. He’s been here for 20 years.

Right now, we’re standing in the south end of the arena in the very spot Springsteen will perform Born to Run in less than 24 hours. But there’s no stage yet. In fact the arena still very much looks like a hockey rink, save for the freshly painted ice.

That’s where Maytwayashing’s crew comes in. By the time their shift ends at 7:59 a.m., the room will be transformed.

Job No. 1 tonight is to cover the ice with Ice Deck — an insulated material in four-by-eight-foot sheets. It will take 500 sheets, 19 people and one hour to cover the entire ice surface.

The Ice Deck does two things: it protects the ice surface, but it also keeps concertgoers warm.

The crew arranges the sheets in a stair-like pattern, starting in the north end and working their way diagonally until the surface is covered. Once they get going, it’s very satisfying to watch, especially from the catwalk above the scoreboard. Each sheet slides into place like a Tetris brick, and the crew moves as though choreographed.

“It’s a beautiful dance,” Maytwayashing says.

Once the floor is in, the crew has to remove the glass, which is actually acrylic. It’s another finely choreographed dance. An oversized suction cup gives them something to grip so they can lift the glass out of the boards. “Coming over to me — coming down,” a crew member says, and multiple hands climb the glass to gently guide it to earth.

“You’ll notice communication is key,” Maytwayashing says.

The bleachers are retracted on the south end to accommodate the stage, and the boards on that side all have to come out as well. “Remember, gentleman, it’s very slick here,” a crew member calls out. Ice tends not to stay within the confines of the boards.

The boards that are left up for the show are draped in black fabric to cover the corporate logos. Black drapes can also obscure the upper 300 level for smaller shows so the artist doesn’t see empty seats. No 300-level draping is required for Springsteen’s sold-out show, though; every seat in the house, including those behind the stage, will be filled.

The scoreboard — which weighs some 27,000 kilograms — is on hydraulic hoists and is moved up out of the sight plane.

The conversion crew just went through this process three days ago. The ice had to be covered and a stage had to be built after Saturday afternoon’s Jets game for Sinclair’s service on Sunday, and then it had to be uncovered again for Disney on Ice prep.

But that’s the gig: to convert an arena is to do a massive amount of work in a short amount of time and then undo it all hours later.

The timelines are tight, and the stakes are high. And the ability to pivot is a must. The team has already had to change its plans this week; if she hadn’t had to postpone her tour, Sarah McLachlan’s concert, originally scheduled for the night before Springsteen, would be loading out right about now.

“Conversions can be pretty tense at times because you have a deadline that you must hit,” Meichsner says. “If we have a forklift breakdown in the middle of the floor during a conversion and you gotta be done in three hours, that’s not good.”

You also can’t just call a service company at 2 or 3 a.m., which is when this process usually happens.

“There’s backups for everything — backup staff, backup tools, backup machinery, even backup equipment,” Meichsner says. “The train needs to keep rolling down the track. We can’t stop once it gets started.”

Conversion work is also precise work — especially when the crew is converting the arena back for hockey. “It demands perfection,” Maytwayashing says.

“If there’s any kind of a seam or an overlap or something that’s misaligned, that could translate to a bad puck deflection or bounce during a game, which is not good,” Meichsner says.

The biggest conversion True North will handle is for motorsports. Not only does all of the glass have to come out, but all the boards as well. The bleachers are retracted all the way around the venue, expanding the floor space from 17,000 square feet up to about 24,000.

The rink is then covered with Ice Deck, followed by a layer of heavy-duty construction poly with overlap seams, followed by two layers of three-quarter-inch plywood over the entire floor. Then come the truckloads and truckloads of dirt — which means truckloads and truckloads of dirt also have to be removed once the event is over.

“It’s a lot of work,” Meichsner says.

Back to Bruce: after the floor is laid and the boards and glass are out, attention is turned to floor seating. Ordinarily, setting up the stage would also be part of the conversion crew’s duties tonight, but Springsteen has his own. (Earlier in the day, staff draped all the dressing rooms in fabric and added homey touches such as lamps and plants. Conversion happens backstage, too.)

The tour will roll in later this morning, and show day is always a busy one, scheduled to the hour. There’s a stage to build and lights to rig and pianos to tune.

But none of that can happen without the overnight work of the conversion crew.

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Less than a minute after Springsteen and the E Street Band leave the stage, and even before the house lights come back up, tear-down will begin. Once the tour heads west for Calgary, the conversion crew will begin the process of changing the arena back over so Disney on Ice can load in first thing Thursday morning.

When the Ice Deck is picked up, there’s always evidence of a show.

“The ice will have ridges and it’ll be a little bit dirty, so we just take the Zamboni out there, do a couple dry shaves to get rid of the dirt, then we’ll do a resurfacing, and it’s good to go,” Meichsner says.

Like nothing happened at all.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com