Word is spreading about the new rink in Belmont.
“We’re getting people from all over the place,” said Barb Taylor of the Belmont Women’s Hockey program, which welcomes beginner hockey players of all ages. “For the women who play hockey, it’s a community, and it’s a unique opportunity to get together. We have women running from 18-69 [years old]. It’s a really multi-generational team sport, and … I’m just really, really happy … that we have a facility that can enable all of that to happen.”
Belmont Women’s Hockey was just one of the many users of the rink in its first peak season.
In fact, more than 1,300 hours of ice time were used, and $270,000 was generated in the first peak season of the town’s new ice rink and sports facility, which opened in November after two years of construction.
“It’s so nice to be able to ‘roll down the hill,’” said Belmont Hill Varsity Hockey Coach Brian Phinney, who explained that after the closure of the old rink, the middle school teams practiced primarily at the Ed Burns Arena in Arlington. “Being around it as a parent, too, we have a five-year-old doing the program there. We saw a lot of fanfare around the opening of the rink, went to one of the high school games … I’m a big believer in having the local hockey scene be strong and having people be excited about it; it’s fun to see.”
While the old rink “certainly had character,” Phinney said the students recognize the privilege of the new rink.
“They recognize that they’re in a pretty fortunate situation,” he said.
According to Mark Carceo of Belmont Youth Hockey Association, having access to a home rink this season was “a huge benefit” to the program.
“When the old rink went out of commission a few years ago, our program had to scrape together ice time in Watertown, Cambridge, Bentley [University], Belmont Hill, and Fessenden [School],” he said in an email to The Voice.
Belmont Youth Hockey has more than 20 teams each season, he said.
“Now we are home, and the convenience for the hockey program and the community as a whole has been fantastic,” Carceo said. “It is great to see not only hockey, but public skating, Stick and Puck, the school events, parties, and figure skating happening each day at the rink.”
According to Select Board Vice Chair Taylor Yates, the first season “went extremely well.”
“Our number one priority this season was to get the community into the facility that they paid for,” he said. “We focused our efforts on growing staff to make ice time more available, recruiting tenants to use up that ice, and, where we could, making improvements based on the feedback from the community.”
Tenant payment revenue from opening day through mid-June (as some rentals were booked out ahead) totaled $224,730, according to Yates. On top of that, the facility generated $31,105 from Stick and Puck programming and $7,150 from skate rentals. In total, the rink revenue came to $270,985.
“It’s not bad, considering what it costs to run the building,” he said. “Our primary focus was getting people into the rink rather than optimizing our [profit and loss].”
It’s not quite the revenue-neutral rink the town is aiming for, but “we’re on our way,” Yates said, emphasizing the priority for the first season was to get people on the ice.
“To me, it’s OK if we’re still figuring out [revenue neutrality],” he said.
According to Yates, the top four users of the rink included Belmont High School, Belmont Youth Hockey Association (BYHA), the Skating Club of Boston, and the Belmont Recreation Department. Other frequent users included Belmont Women’s Hockey and the Valley Hockey League.
“We ended up having a higher demand than supply,” he said. “Our supply was really dictated by the staff. I don’t know the vacancy rate, but I suspect if we were tracking it, it would be very low.”
Rink Manager Erik Harrington said that, factoring in staff, which includes a rotation of Zamboni drivers, he would estimate that about 95% of the available, staffed hours were used.
Looking Forward
The next year will involve transitioning the rink from the Building Committee, led by Chair Mark Haley, to the Facilities Department, creating more ways for people to participate in the rink, and taking a “hard look” at rates and what drives them.
“It looks like summer is actually going to be a fairly busy time for ice because there are a lot of camps that seem to have interest in ice,” Yates said. “The low season seems to be spring. After the high school and BYHA finish their main winter season, there’s a real drop-off in usage.”
And that raises the question—what should the town do during that time of year?
“We did promise a multi-sport facility, including non-ice sports,” Yates said. “But I don’t know if that’s going to be a next-year problem; right now, we don’t have any kind of flooring for non-ice sports.”
Though the plan had been for a multi-sports facility, it got “value-engineered out” of the design prior to construction.
“We’d have to find money for flooring,” Yates said. “We’d have to find what kind of flooring is appropriate.”
As for other future revenue sources, Harrington said the town has a request for proposals to secure advertisers for the scoreboard and to wrap the Zamboni.
“I think overall [the first season] went well,” he said. “With opening up a new facility, there were a few kinks to be worked out. We were operating under a temporary certificate of occupancy, so we did have some construction going on in some spaces, but overall it went well getting people in Belmont back on the ice in Belmont,” he said.
