by ASHLEY HUTCHESON
Globe And Mail

Home-Ice advantage

With visions of NHL paycheques dancing in their heads, hockey parents are shelling out megabucks
for backyard rinks with boards, lighting and built-in cooling systems. Patrick White Reports.

For 15 seasons he was Captain Crunch, the gritty heart-and-soul of several NHL teams. Today, Wendal Clark is just the Zamboni driver. At his 40-acre spread 50 kilometres north of Toronto, Mr. Clark derives as much satisfaction laying a glassy finish behind his portable ice resurfacer as he once did wristing pucks past helpless goalies.

"It's pretty much my day job, " says the son of a saskatchewan farmer. Enclosed by a barn and chilled by a high-powered refrigeration unit, Mr. Clark's 125-foot -long rink is a little more elaborate than the rough-hewn backyard sheets on which stars such as Wayne Gretzky honed their game. But that's not that unusual these days. For the past decade, the popularity of up-market backyard rinks has exploded in North America as hockey fans try to cram as much of the big league spectacle as they can into the comfort of their own property.

Where hockey dads of decades past slapped together workable rinks with little more than plywood and a garden hose, today's backyard sheets incorporate stadium lighting, mini zambonis, full boards and cooling systems capable of sustaining ice before the weather hits -15.

From Captain Crunch to Mr. zmboni: Former Toronto Maple Leaf Wendel Clark resurfaces the ice in his backyard rink.

Owners of these backyard rinks say they were forced into it. Warmer winters have made ice maintenance across Canada's southern population belt a complicated affair. " The climate here just isn't conducive to backyard rinks any more," Mr. Clark says. "A lot of people try but only get two weeks out of it."

Laurence Metrick learned this the hard way. For three years, he tried making old fashioned ice in his front yard. But he and his two kids were force to skip two of the three seasons because of slush. "I didn't like it," says the director of Metrick Entertainment, a communications company. "I'd be out their watering forever. The odd time, I'd fall in a puddle of water."

So one day eight years ago, Mr. Metrick, vacillating between investing in a better rink or a new Porsche, called Custom Ice Inc., a Burlington, Ont., company that had launched a few months earlier to build residential ice sheets and refrigeration units. "it turned out the rink was cheaper than the Porsche," Mr Metrick says. The company installed a 50-by-30-foot ice surface with a small cooling unit. "It was by far the best dumb thing I've ever done in my life," he says.

The mini-rink takes its share of labours. His two boys, 16 and 13, have spent much of this winter shoveling snow and resurfacing the ice with hot water. "In our house, anyone who wants to take a shower at night - too bad!" Mr. Metrick's ice lasts for about five months in a climate where the average natural rink yields little more than six weeks of good skating.

That extended shinny schedule comes at a price. The average Custom Ice rink costs about $75,000, according to the company, and it has sold fully enclosed models complete with bleacher seating and stadium lighting for about $1-million. "A lot of parents just want their kids to have that extra little edge," says Glenn Winder, vice-president of Custom Ice. "Every parent with a kid between the ages of 5 and 10 thinks they have a future NHLer on their hands. They call our rinks the scholarship fund."

Custom Ice Rinks Inc.; 1-866-877-8840 or 905 632-8840