Mackenzie Investments announced on April 19 that Adanac Ski Club was one of the two co-winners for the Mackenzie Top Peak challenge. The contest winners for this year won a sum of $50,000 each to invest in local community projects.**
Sudbury.com was able to do an interview with Adanac Ski Club back in March when the contest was ongoing and the group was still looking for community support.
The Adanac Ski Club had been looking to replace the small, run-down shack at the bottom of the hill for years now.
“We've been trying to fundraise to replace our existing race headquarters for years now,” said Angele Carriere, a representative of the Adanac Ski Club, in March.
“It's too small, it's rotten. It doesn't even have a floor, it floods every spring. We have to rent other trailers on sites just to house our equipment, because it's not big enough.”
The Mackenzie Top Peaks contest started back in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic took over the world.
“When COVID hit, it impacted so many people in so many ways,” Mackenzie Investments representative Court Elliott told Sudbury.com.
“So depending on where you were in Canada, ski hills were shut down, or there were restrictions. There were all these different things that happened. We’re like, ‘Oh, my goodness, we need to do something to keep the momentum going to keep people excited, and to really keep the ski communities going.’ So that's how we came up with Mackenzie Top Peak.”
This was the first year Mackenzie Investments selected two winners for the challenge since they started.
“I think they both had such compelling stories. It was just really challenging for us to pick one winner. So when we looked at it, and the judges compared and contrasted, they just couldn't take one over the other because both of them tried so hard.
“They spent so much time and energy, they did such an amazing job and their communities were so invested, that they just said, ‘You know what, we're going to figure out how to have two winners this year,’” Elliott said.
Adanac Ski Club had already partnered with a local architectural firm that donated their time to craft a design for a new building should the club win the prize from the contest. The design took into account the $50,000 budget and was provided free-of-charge to the ski club.
With the new blueprints for a new shack and the funds to complete the project, the ski club is excited for the new amenities for the next ski season.
“We were elated. We were over the moon. I couldn't hold back the tears [when the winners were first announced],” Carriere told Sudbury.com in a recent interview. “I couldn't find the words and I couldn't pull back the tears.”
The challenge had been four weeks long with an intense social media campaign from the ski club as well as Sudbury community members and other ski hills in Ontario.
“Our team has about 130 members, but we had kids participating, we had parents, we had grandparents, we had members of the community,” Carriere said.
“And so we had the entire community behind us. Once we were in the top 10, we were the only team left in Ontario in the entire contest.
“And so Alpine Ontario, which is the association that regulates ski racing in Ontario, got behind us as well and tried to get a whole bunch of teams, all throughout Ontario to support us. And so we had multiple teams throughout Ontario, supporting us and participating and voting and using our hashtags. It was amazing.”
Thanks to the community and other hills across Ontario supporting Adanac, the club will be able to refurbish the shack that is not only used by the growing club, but also students from local school boards.
“It means everything. We are a small team compared to some of these large, massive western and eastern teams from massive resort towns,” Carriere said. “The fact that we rallied the entire Sudbury community to support us is just out of this world. It means so much to us that McKenzie has decided to invest in us. It's actually surreal.”
**An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the prize was won by the Adanac Ski Hill, not Adanac Ski Club. The story has been corrected.
