Home and Garden Show takes over ice center
For one weekend, gardening and home improvement replaced hockey and ice skating at the George S. Eccles Ice Center.
A floor made of interlocking rubber mats covered the surface of the ice, and more than 90 vendors set up booths for the Cache Valley Media Group 2012 Home and Garden Show on March 23-24.
Carl Yeip, a sales representative for the Kaysville-based food storage company Daily Bread, said he thought the ice center was a good venue for the event.
“My feet are freezing,” Yeip said. “We’re standing on a block of wood, our feet are so cold. But other than that, (it’s) great.”
Yeip, a sophomore studying geology at USU, said he works for Daily Bread to help pay for college.
Greg Roper, general sales manager at Cache Valley Media Group and the event’s coordinator, said for the past seven or eight years the event was held in the Nelson Fieldhouse. This year event planners chose the ice center because of its location and parking.
“The biggest advantage and the whole reason we moved it from USU – USU has been good and the facility was great,” Roper said. “I don’t have anything bad to say about Utah State University at all – it’s just the location and the parking. It’s on 8991 Main Street. Everybody knows how to get here.”
Roper said the media group had a few concerns about changing the venue of the garden show.
“The biggest concern was how cold is it going to be,” Roper said. “Yeah, it’s a little chilly, but it’s not horrible. People that come in and go through the show, they enjoy it. They seem to be liking the energy that’s here.”
Floyd Naegle, executive director for the ice center, said though the ice maintains a temperature of 20 F, the “sports court” covering helps keep air above it warmer.
“That floor almost acts like an insulator, so the (heat) doesn’t hurt it,” Naegle said. “We turn it up about 6 or 8 degrees. It’s pleasant. It’s about 60 degrees, but if you get a bunch of bodies out there, it’s more like 65.”
Roper said parking at the ice center is more simple than parking on campus.
“There have been no parking problems whatsoever,” he said. “When we were at the university, we were allowed only during their Spring Break, and they didn’t change their parking regulations during that time period. So we had many many people who still got tickets, and (vendors) had to park a long ways away to get their stuff into the venue.”
Naegle said though the ice center had to cancel its usual skating activities, the garden show was an ideal event for the ice center to host. The ice center and Cache Valley Media Group have worked together often in the past, and the publicity generated by the garden show may help introduce new customers to the ice center, Naegle said.
“The amount of advertising they do on the radio, where every advertisement says, ‘at the George S. Eccles Ice Center,’ is invaluable,” Naegle said. “One of the things I’ve been chartered to do is get a new clientele in here … most people know the ice center is here, but many of them still have not come in and seen what a jewel of a facility this is.”
Naegle said the ice center will use the sports court again for the Spice on Ice culinary competition March 29.
– steve.kent@aggiemail.usu.edu