Feature Story

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The North Rink – a symbol of community commitment

By Jack Blatherwick

Let’s Play Hockey Columnist

Days before the Section 8AA high school final, the rumor was spreading that a Moorhead coach was happy the game with Roseau was to be played on Wednesday night.

“It’s good,” he was alleged to say. “Their people will be in church on Wednesday night, and we won’t have to battle the whole town.”

But when it comes to supporting their hockey team, Roseau never does it halfway. For a big game like this, the whole town travels with them. The minister moved the Wednesday service to Tuesday night and led the caravan down to Thief River Falls for the 6-1 victory over Moorhead.

Roseau, like Warroad, and other northern Minnesota communities, is committed to hockey, of course. But, the real commitment is to their kids — no matter what sport they choose. For example, when girls’ hockey started in Roseau, the school district passed a bond issue and built another rink — a multipurpose field house near the school that also serves baseball, track and other sports.

Compare this with other Minnesota communities that told the boys’ programs to reduce their ice time to allow girls to practice and compete. These same school boards built new gyms when girls’ basketball started — added new soccer fields and softball diamonds. A few complaints by boys’ coaches were muffled behind closed doors — something like, “We built these arenas. The schools didn’t. Let the girls shovel and flood for a few years and raise their own money for construction.”

But Roseau folks weren’t complaining. When it comes to kids — they just get things done. In this case, it was a school bond to add another rink — the reasoning was that girls’ hockey deserves a new arena, and the additional sport should not reduce ice time for boys. Not bad logic, really — it should have occurred to every school board.

It is the tradition in Roseau to be a leader. When boys’ high school hockey was starting, just after World War II, they built one of the first indoor ice arenas in the state, Memorial Arena. Attached to it was the “North Rink,” a downsized sheet of natural ice with walls and a roof to protect players from the arctic winds whipping down from Canada.

The North Rink has never been rented. It exists for kids to play pick-up games, for practicing skills, and for keepaway and shinny hockey. According to local folks, “It is unlimited ice time that creates hockey players, and we have three rinks in Roseau for 2,700 people.”

Note: if we follow the math, this equates to 200 indoor rinks in Minneapolis — but we have four. So hockey is dying in the big city and thriving on the northern border. “It’s a demographic thing,” we are told. “Hockey’s too expensive” — but in the Cities, we raise the price of ice rental each year.

The ice is not for rent in Roseau. Youth teams charge a minimal fee (around $100 for the year) and that pays for USA Hockey fees, practices, games, travel — and of course, the opportunity to skate in the North Rink, 24/7.

How can this be? The answer is simple and old fashioned. It’s all about volunteerism and a commitment to Roseau hockey that continues, even when you’ve moved from the community. When the North Rink needed to be demolished and replaced, there was no bond issue, no public money, just a tradition: you either dug deep into your pockets or rolled up your sleeves and brought your tool belt over to the rink.

Carson Hedlund is the chief volunteer among hundreds who pitch in. Hedlund is the golf course superintendent in summer months and the one who manages and maintains the North Rink without receiving a dime. On a typical winter morning, he gets up early to clean things up and make sure the ice is perfect. There are coffee breaks of course; then, he usually heads home 16 hours later at about 10 p.m. This is volunteerism — Roseau style.

If there are some diehards who want to skate later into the night, the door is left open and, “They all know where the light switch is,” Hedlund says. “The pick-up games might be full ice, half ice or cross ice. We just put out tires for barriers between the games. It’s common to have 40-50 people on the ice at the same time — some old, some young, some pros, some beginners. I think the only mistake we’ve made in the North Rink is to add a scoreboard for structured games.”

The hockey old-timers in Roseau know the value of pickup games. “It’s where you learn to think,” says Bob Lund. “And you just can’t beat hockey players who can think.”

Many former stars are among the volunteers: some NHL’ers, some collegians, some Olympians and some who led their high school team to one of it’s seven state championships. Most hockey alumni have at least played in a State High School Tournament. After all, the Rams have participated in 32 out of the 64.

Three alumni — Butsy Erickson, Paul Anderson and Dave Grafstrom — coach the Bantam A team that just qualified to “go to state.”

“Are we a great team?” Erickson was asked. “We’ll see.”

Of course Butsy played with two Broten brothers – Neal and Aaron – on a Bantam team that annihilated opponents, so this group will have to go some in the state tournament to get an A+ grade.

“You all chip in — anyway you can,” said Hedlund. “We raised every penny for the North Rink before we started construction. It’s a simple steel structure, and the contractor did it for peanuts. Then the volunteers took over — electricians, carpenters, brick layers and some who didn’t know which end of the hammer to hold until they worked a few days.”

“We added locker rooms and bought used boards from the Coliseum in St. Paul. The total cost, including all recent additions comes to only $700,000. We’ve added some viewing areas for the parents, and for this latest project, we only made a couple phone calls. The word got out, and we had 50 people show up ready to work.”

Architects in the Twin Cities area just don’t have this volunteer thing down. Ask them what it costs to build a simple practice arena. “Let me work it out,” they’ll say. Then they investigate — find out how much money can be squeezed out of the local suburb and design a monument to the architect.

The North Rink — done the suburban Twin Cities way? “It’ll be at least $4 million for a bare-bones arena,” they’ll estimate. So the cost of ice rental continues to rise, inner city hockey dies and each suburb thinks they need a few hundred more players to be competitive.

Speaking of “competitive,” we’ll see this weekend if it’s about demographics. We’ll see if — in 2008, like every year of the last 60 — two small northern towns can compete with the large suburbs. One thing’s for sure: Roseau and Warroad will be ghost towns this week. They’ll each form a long caravan on the road to St. Paul. When you live in one of these two hockey towns, participation in the State Tournament is a perennial part of the calendar — printed in permanent ink.

Just in case we see a familiar name or two — a skating style that reminds us of a grandfather or father from a previous tournament, or playmaking genius we recognize from the past — keep in mind it all started at the North Rink.

Jack Blatherwick, Ph.D., is a physiologist for the Washington Capitals.