Frozen in Memory, Conejo Valley Ice Rink Is Now Facing Closure

The place is a dump, no doubt about it.

Every wall covered with black smears from the impact of 17 years worth of hockey pucks flying off the ice. Hasty plywood repairs on the boards behind the goalies’ nets. Only a forlorn hot drinks vending machine offering dubious relief from constant damp and cold.

But still, there is something besides mustiness in the air of the Conejo Valley Ice Skating Center.

Memories of that solid check that sent the other hockey player slamming into the boards, the perfect slap shot, a small skater’s first completed spin, the arabesque that lasted the length of the ice.

“It’s quaint,” said Caren Kiner, watching her 5-year-old son Ben race around the ice in unsteady circles earlier this week. “That is what I would say about this dump. It’s quaint.”

Another hockey mom, Carol Gutesha, paused before hustling 3-year-old Alex out of the dark rink and into the bright sunlight of Newbury Park.

“This rink is run-down, but it sure has character,” Gutesha said. “I would love to see it stay here.”

But the Conejo Valley Ice Skating Center, on Ventu Park Road just off the Ventura Freeway, is most likely headed for a serious defrosting. Sean McGillivray, the Nova Scotia native and hockey enthusiast who has run the rink for the last seven years, is relocating to another man-made piece of perpetual winter.

McGillivray has just built an Olympic-size rink and a National Hockey League-size rink side by side in Simi Valley. When they open, probably as soon as next week, he and his teaching and coaching staff will depart the Newbury Park rink forever.

Home Depot, just next door, owns the building housing the rink. Brian Marino, the store’s manager, said he was not sure what would happen to it.

“As far as I know, we are not going to take that property as part of the store,” Marino said. “I assume we’re going to have another tenant in there. But I really don’t know.”

McGillivray said the Newbury Park rink, though tiny and run-down, has long been the only place in the area to ice-skate. Even though the rink was far from perfect, he struggled to keep it open, taking over its management in 1987 after it nearly closed down.

“I just wanted to keep the ice up so that we could keep the sport alive,” McGillivray said. “We just worked really hard to keep it open. It was an old building and it was never designed properly to be a rink. We’ve been keeping it together almost literally with bubble gum and Band-Aids.”

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Skating instructor Jennifer Laumann remembers when the Conejo Valley rink was brand new: the biggest, the nicest, the best-polished sheet of ice around. She skated here as a young girl, eventually turning pro and performing with Walt Disney’s World on Ice. She skated the part of the Evil Queen in Snow White.

“Lots of blood, sweat and tears in this rink,” Laumann said, looking out fondly on the now bumpy expanse of ice, made uneven by expanding permafrost under its surface.

“It’s amazing the beauty you can get,” she said as a few young skaters passed by on long, graceful legs. “This beautiful sport in a rink that maybe needs a face lift.”

“A piece of my own personal history is going to be closing,” Laumann said. “You know how you finish high school or you move? You don’t think about it, then all of a sudden it hits you. This is part of me that I’m leaving behind.”

Others also got their start in Newbury Park and continued into professional skating careers. Todd Sands and Natasha Kuchiki were U.S. National pairs champions in 1991 and 1992. Steve Bogoyevac, captain of the Los Angles Blades, the professional roller hockey team, began his hockey career skating here.

Hollywood types have even dropped in from time to time. Alan Thicke, star of the old television series “Growing Pains,” played hockey in the rink’s adult league. Actor Chad Lowe, better known as the brother of actor Rob Lowe, got checked into these boards by a professional woman hockey player from Finland, McGillivray said.

More recently, the Tonya Harding saga created two new stars who trained on the Newbury Park ice. Tisha Walker, a 1992 Olympics contender, was the skating double for an actress playing Harding in an NBC made-for-TV movie about the Nancy Kerrigan knee-whacking incident.

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Sarah Shaub, a tiny 5-year-old from Moorpark, with a blond ponytail, blue eyes and a lot of natural talent, played a young Tonya Harding in the same movie.

While Sarah spun happily away on center ice Thursday, her mother Joan said she would be happy to relocate from what she refers to as “the bomb” to the brand new facility in Simi Valley, which features, among other amenities, heated locker rooms and a restaurant. She said her daughter has yet to see the new facility.

“I haven’t even taken her over there,” Shaub said. “She’ll drive me nuts when she sees it.”

Sarah had little to say on the matter beyond an emphatic head shake when asked if she would miss the Newbury Park rink.

But McGillivray was more sentimental.

“I’ll miss everything about it,” he said, “from being up there at 4 a.m. coaching, to walking in and smelling the old rink, to seeing the kids grow. Just seeing it close, I’ll probably shed a tear.”