Feature Story
The winter of ‘65
Let’s Play Hockey Columnist
The word around local hockey circles is
that some communities are planning to build outdoor rinks with artificial ice
plants. Bad plan. Use your money wisely. Arenas with
down-sized ice sheets can be built for much less than architects will tell you.
To illustrate why I oppose outdoor
artificial ice, I’ll recount a bit of weather history, because some readers
might have difficulty remembering the winter of 1964-65. Actually, it’s pretty
simple really. It snowed every day.
Sorry, I exaggerate. There were days when
we actually saw the sun, but after school, we were either shoveling last
night’s heavy snowfall, or the combination of wind and cold made it almost
unbearable conditions for outdoor hockey.
Almost unbearable, however, meant that we
did practice. As Dave Peterson put it decades later, “We didn’t have wind chill
in those days.”
Coach Pete was speaking to members of the
Olympic team he coached, who were reluctant to walk through the wind and cold
to get to the nice warm indoor practice site.
“We never missed a day of practice in the
old days,” he continued.
He was speaking about the years he
coached
Ah, but the old coach was wrong. In the
winter of ’65, practices were more often about shoveling snow than learning
hockey. I coached at Breck that year and got so adept
with the tractor, I almost changed careers. After all, teaching math didn’t pay
as well as shoveling snow, because unions were just barely getting started in
educational circles. They’d been advocating for laborers since the days of
robber barons.
It’s not as if tractors flipped the snow
over the boards and groomed the ice perfectly for practice. The heavy wheels of
the tractor left snow compacted on the ice, so hockey was impossible until we
shoveled by hand and flooded with the hose.
That’s why our first choice was to leave the tractor in the garage, and
for players and coaches to shovel, so we could practice on good ice once the
chores were completed.
Many mornings, however, after a heavy
snowfall, the tractor was the only answer. There was so much snow that winter,
we had to pay twice for a front loader to move our snow piles away from the
boards, so we could shovel some more. After all, we could only throw it so
high.
How high is that? When you skated down
the near side of the rink, you couldn’t see the adjacent gymnasium. In games,
the players who were resting for a shift, had to slide
down the bank and over the boards to get back in the game. Needless to say, standing in the snowbank was a drag, so we normally suited up only two
lines and four D. The backup goaltender wore boots and a huge parka.
As a player in the years before that, I
always enjoyed flooding the rink after practice, trying to make the ice like
glass. “The best in the state,” we
gloated.
The entire team shoveled the snow from
practice, and would pick a group of three players to flood. This took a couple
hours, and as you turned out the lights, there was a sense of pride that your
group had made the smoothest ice of the week.
However, if snow started falling while
you were driving home, your heart sank, because you knew the next day’s
practice would not be held on good ice — if you practiced at all. It doesn’t
take much snow to ruin the skills of hockey.
That’s why, on days when it didn’t snow, you would never call off
practice because of a little cold and wind.
So I ask the advocates of expensive
compressors and pipes under the ice, how many days in a
And, you might not realize that on sunny
days, the reflection of the sun off the boards on the north side of the rink
will make the ice dangerously soft — even with the compressors working
overtime. When someone stops quickly, they could fall headfirst toward the
boards.
Last winter, the Washington Capitals held
a practice at a private golf course, where outdoor artificial ice was
maintained by the ground crew. It was a beautiful setting, great boards and plexiglas surrounded by the golf
course, snow, and a huge stately clubhouse. The grounds crew of six full-time
employees kept the rink in good condition for youth hockey.
Compressors froze the ice from
late-November on; a Zamboni groomed it after two
tractors and six employees shoveled; and rosy-cheeked kids had a great time.
That is, they had a great time when it wasn’t snowing and the wind wasn’t
blowing.
They don’t have super-cold temperatures
in
It’s just a five-foot wide path, but it
is always soft on a sunny day — even when the ambient temperature is below freezing.
So, the Capitals’ coaches — not wanting to lose an Ovechkin
for the season — planned practice drills that used the other 90 percent of the
rink. And since Oly
Kolzig was the second goalie to get on the ice, he
had to defend the end with the bright sun in his eyes — another one of those
annoying facts of nature.
But I digress. In the winter of ’65, it
was our good fortune that one of the player/shovelers
came from a wealthy family that decided to build a covered arena — thinking
perhaps that their son might be a college hockey player someday if he spent
more time studying and practicing hockey — less time shoveling.
We had natural ice for the next 10 years
— no compressors to freeze the ground — just plenty of doors and fans to
control the temperature in the arena. You closed the doors on warm days and
opened them to let cold air in at night.
How did the cover work? The varsity and
JV never missed a practice or game in ten years. And, on only nine percent of the days from
December 1 until mid-March, was it too warm to rent the ice at night.
It was bitter cold inside some days — for
spectators who came in high-heeled shoes or coat and tie. However, on those
cold days, players never mentioned the temperature after a good warmup — I mean a hard-skating warmup.
Cold without wind is not a problem once you warmed up.
Wind chill, snow and sun became a thing
of the past. However, on artificial outdoor rinks these elements are a much
greater problem than anyone with a short memory might imagine.
Jack Blatherwick,
Ph.D., is a physiologist for the