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Rainbow board’s multimillion soccer dome finally reopens to community use

The $4.1M facility opened in early 2020, only to close a month later due to COVID
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The Lancer Dome at Lasalle Secondary School is seen here last fall.

After being closed to community use for nearly two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Rainbow District School Board reopened bookings of its indoor soccer dome to the general public as of Monday.

After numerous false starts, delays, different funding sources and proposed locations dating back as far as 2012, the $4.1-million soccer bubble opened on the Lasalle Secondary School campus in February 2020, to the delight of the local sports community.

However, with the pandemic hitting Canada just a month later, the soccer bubble (known officially as the Lancer Dome, referring to Lasalle’s school mascot) remained closed to community use until this week.

While the dome was closed to the wider community, the Rainbow board has been using the facility for school activities at points during the pandemic.

The Rainbow board has now published a notice on its website, inviting the general public to book the soccer bubble.

The board’s director of education, Bruce Bourget, said the board has received many requests to reopen the soccer bubble to community use throughout the pandemic. 

Whenever the COVID-19 situation would start to get better over the past couple of years, the board would consider the matter. But “the ebbs and flows of waves didn’t allow for a restart” earlier in the pandemic, he said.

“It's one more step towards normalcy that I think our entire community is probably looking forward to,” Bourget said.

“So we're happy to do that. We thank everybody for their patience. We always want to do things when it's deemed safe. So we've consulted with public health, and we're in alignment now with guidelines.”

Besides soccer, the dome can also be used for sports including frisbee, football and baseball, he said.

When the soccer dome opened in February 2020, Greater Sudbury Soccer Club was one of the major tenants, renting the facility at $400 an hour for roughly 20-30 hours per week for both youth and adult programming.

Connor Vanderweghe, executive director of the Greater Sudbury Soccer Club, said the club is in the process of organizing indoor soccer at the bubble for its members. He advises people to keep an eye on the club’s social media pages for the latest updates.

“We're really excited,” he said. “We can't be more excited to have the opportunity to play indoor soccer again and offer 12 months programming to our members.”

Having a brand-new soccer dome in Sudbury and being unable to use it for two years was “frustrating,” Vanderweghe said.

“But to be honest, that’s behind us,” he said. “It’s open, let’s get it started, and let’s get everybody back playing soccer.”


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Heidi Ulrichsen

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