Atlantic Canada gets national-level indoor track

For the first time, thanks to the efforts of a diverse team of investors and stakeholders headed by Saint John, NB runner, track coach, business owner, community builder and Athletics Canada board chair Bill MacMackin, eastern Canada now has an indoor track facility capable of hosting national-calibre meets. The Ellis-MacMackin Track is housed in the Irving Oil Field House, which officially opened on November 9 after 21 months of construction and six years of planning and fundraising before the shovels hit the ground in February 2018.

The track is named for Saint John Track & Field Club founder Walter Ellis (who died in 1995) and MacMackin, who oversaw the project, and who trained as a middle-distance runner under Ellis as a teenager and later competed on several provincial teams and the University of New Brunswick. (MacMackin is also credited with reviving and rebuilding the club in 2004 after it had been dormant for some years, with help from other community members and Athletics New Brunswick.) The building also houses facilities for soccer and all other field sports, as well as badminton and pickleball. It also has a community walking track, child care and many drop-in programs.

The track will play host to no fewer than six meets between now and March, including the Atlantic University Championships, the Atlantic Age-Class Championships and the Canadian Masters Championships, and in 2021 it will host the U Sports national indoor championships in partnership with the University of New Brunswick, as well as the Athletics Canada age-class indoor championships, previously held in Montreal.

“There are a number of smaller facilities across eastern Canada, and they’re great venues, but as the specifications have changed, this is the newest and the one that provides full capacity to host national-calibre meets,” says MacMackin, who explains that securing meets for the first three or four years of the facility’s life, in other sports like soccer as well as in track and field, was a key element of the business plan. “We approached it much like you would approach any other business,” says MacMackin. “How do we justify the investment and work on an ongoing basis to build the community asset?”

A lifelong athlete, MacMackin was well qualified to lead the project, between growing the track club to more than 200 members and overseeing the $6.5 million redevelopment of the Canada Summer Games site in 2011, which included a renovated stadium facility housing a new track and new turf fields.

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As a longtime business owner (MacMackin and his brother Steve MacMackin have run the family’s funeral company for many years), MacMackin was able to call on the expertise, goodwill, time and financial resources of his many friends in the local business community to create a board of directors and do the research required to build a business plan. The group partnered with the local YMCA, which manages the facility. “I sat in the lead chair, but I owe a lot of kudos to other people who contributed both financially and with time and expertise,” MacMackin says.

The initial capital investment of $4 million, as well as the land the facility sits on, came from the Exhibition Association of Saint John. The group raised another $4.5 million in corporate and individual donations, and received $2 million from Irving Oil Limited for naming rights. MacMackin is particularly proud of the fact that the provincial and federal governments’ contributions totalled only 44 per cent of the total cost of $27.3 million.

The track club has grown significantly just in the last few months, in anticipation of the facility opening, MacMackin reports. “This is really life-changing for our community and our track club. We’ve already forgotten what it used to be like in the other gym.”

The impact of the project is being felt all across eastern Canada, in terms of both economic activity and training and competition for runners throughout the Maritimes. Lee McCarron, head coach of the Halifax Road Hammers and a personal friend of MacMackin’s, says, “I think over time there will be a big benefit. I see future races being held more consistently, which will give Nova Scotia runners more opportunities to compete at indoor races–right now it’s fairly limited… so this track will hopefully provide more opportunities for us.”