If so, show me your rink.
This is kind of cheating… the inlaws live on a lake. Currently it’s frozen. So here’s our ODR.
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Pond hockey eh?
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It’s raining but currently the ice is pretty good.
That’s a beauty BLep. We used to have a neighbor with a big yard that had a great rink. If I had a bigger yard I would put one in for the kids in the hood. Homemade rinks are the bomb for the hockey kids
This is all natural. That’s the bay my in-laws live on. All I did was shovel it clean.
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Flooded some old lady’s backyard once, when we were kids in CT
Our neighbors had a big one set up last year but it was liquid most of the winter.
We have a really nice community rink (actually two, one boarded and one not) close to home.
So no backyard rink for us.
That’s awesome.
Do the kids still throw their sticks in a pile to pick teams?
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All two of them?
I mistakenly assumed your kids had any friends :).
Not at their grandparents place.
Please enlighten a dumb American who cannot skate as to this process…
At the beginning of a game, everyone throws their sticks in a pile. One person closes their eyes, picks up the sticks and alternates tossing them in to two separate piles. That’s how teams are picked. It was a fun way to randomize teams and get to know all the neighborhood kids because you inevitably end up playing with everyone.
When I was a kid, between games there would always be a bit of goofing around, warming up the goalie, socializing etc. someone would yell “Sticks in!!” and everyone would launch their stick from wherever they were to center ice (or in our case, center court).
No pic handy as I haven’t done it in a while, but lived on a lake for 20 years and made rinks on the regular. Advice that I got early on was to mop it. Cleared off the snow and then drilled a hole in the ice (not too close), filled buckets of water from it and used a cheap mop on the rink. It lets you put down less water than just flooding the whole thing and does a great job.
Interesting idea. I’ll need to get an auger.
Fun memories when my son was coming up in youth hockey.
We’re generally too warm in VA/DC area for an outdoor rink to work. A nearby pond froze over enough to allow for a hockey net and skates just just once in the past 15ish years that I remember.
The team used to do an annual tournament in Lake Placid. Between games, the kids would be out on the frozen lakes/ponds for … more hockey.
No boards? In high school my XC ski coach would build a backyard rink before he moved out of the burbs. Had half height board, maybe 1/3 scale rink. He built a resurfacing machine that was hooked to a garden hose, and ran some water out on to a piece of outdoor carpet. Kept the ice in great shape. Pond hockey is core to MN culture, every kid whether or not the played organized hockey skated at someone’s pond or the community outdoor rinks. Lots of boot hockey too.