Rocky Mountain House and Clearwater County have submitted a joint bid to host the 1st ever Alberta Masters Games in the summer of 2019.

As Director of Recreation and Community Services with the Town of Rocky Mountain House Roger Smolnicky explains, this new Alberta Games format is an evolution of the former Alberta Seniors Games.

“What they did is they opened up the categories, we’re able to host 35 and over participants for the first time ever in Alberta and still have a 55 and over category for different venues as well.  Our bid is actually for late August in 2019 and it’s both summer and winter activities which is quite unique.  We’ll be looking at hosting things from ice hockey tournaments to slo-pitch tournaments to golf tournaments to curling events.  We’re targeting about 12-1400 participants”.

Smolnicky says hosting the Games would be a great opportunity to showcase the region for sport tourism.

“We have some unique features within the Clearwater region, David Thompson Country that make our games even more unique as we would like to host some river events, some bicycle events out to Nordegg, perhaps some of the running events would be cross country running through the country here.  So we do plan on fulling utilizing the town facilities and quite a few of the amenities within the Clearwater region”.

Total budget to host is estimated at 1.1 million dollars, with both the Town and County asked to contribute $75 thousand dollars each.

The successful host community is expected to be announced in mid-February.