“ make it really rough and bumpy, but it’s something to have so that people aren’t skating on concrete.”
They gathered ice cubes from the arena’s concession stands and patted them into the melted spots on the ice.
#FROZEN PERIMETER ICE SKATING GAME FOR SCHOOL LEARNING FULL#
The compressor’s pipes don’t extend the full perimeter of the ice, and Gates and his team had to improvise. Gates said that the hardest ice spots to maintain are the edges around the boards. They sometimes spent entire days tending to the ice. In August, Gates and his seven-person staff were tasked with maintaining the ice despite temperatures that were often well above freezing inside the arena. “I’ve always been able to power through at one point or another, just with a little bit of setbacks.”īut making the ice is just the beginning of a months-long battle to keep it in good condition, and it almost always never stays that way. “If the compressors were just to not turn on one year, we’d just have to work on it as best as we can until we can get somewhere with it,” he said.
If it ever does happen, there’s no set plan for what would happen next. In his six years working at the arena, Gates said he has never faced a dead compressor at the beginning of the ice-making season. “Every year when we build the ice, we hope that turns on. Hogan, Gates and the rest of Bird Arena’s ice crew cross their fingers at the start of each ice-making year. Updating the compressors would require the removal of a large chunk of wall and one of the two scoreboards at the arena, a prohibitively expensive process. Gates said the ice compressors are from the 1990s and have not been renovated. It’s the first step of building a fresh ice sheet in a building that struggles with sustaining efficient air conditioning when the temperatures outside are sizzling. The ice compressor plant, which was dormant for months, has to be turned on again in August for the ice to be built. “There’s no circulation or ventilation inside the rink,” Ethan Gates, the head ice-making employee at Bird Arena, said. With the warmer summer months, the temperature inside the empty building is close to the sometimes sweltering temperature outside. All that remains in the arena is a giant slab of concrete. Brown and dark grey spots mar the middle of the slushy rink, and even those attending their first hockey game will notice that nothing about the arena is new.Īfter Ohio’s season concludes in March and the campus transitions to summer mode in May, the ice is removed. “Whatever needs to get done needs to get done.”Īs Ohio begins each season, usually in late September, Bird Arena’s ice is ugly. “We wear a variety of hats around here,” he said. Hogan is paid to be a hockey coach, but the outdated and sometimes dysfunctional Bird Arena requires him to be much more than a coach.
The ice sheet’s edges tend to be the worst spots when the arena heats up, and he was desperate to preserve the ice for Ohio’s next two home games in just a few days. When Hogan canceled a practice in 2017, he had to fill the perimeter of Bird Arena’s ice sheet with more frozen, compact ice. So, on occasion, Hogan cancels practice for the safety of his players. When the temperatures reach 90 degrees at the beginning of Ohio’s practice season in September and settle between 70-80 degrees in October, the ice surface softens, the puck bounces more and the players’ skate blades have less grip on the ice. It’s one of the numerous issues about the aged arena, which also features a small wooden press box known as “The Bird’s Nest,” one of the smallest visiting benches in the American Collegiate Hockey Association and a roughly 1,000 person seating capacity that’s only possible because of limited leg space. Bird Arena, Ohio’s 61-year-old home, doesn’t have an efficient cooling system to keep the ice, well, ice. If the answer is yes, Hogan has to improvise. “I’m looking at weather reports all the time,” he said. Sean Hogan might be the only college hockey coach in the U.S who has to worry about the weather.
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