America Catches Ice Fever

Turn on the TV any weekend and see Olympic skating star Kristi Yamaguchi. Check the Nielsen ratings and see figure skating consistently finishing in the top five sports programs. Watch new ice rinks sprout in warm climes like Phoenix, Biloxi, Miss., and St. Petersberg, Fla.

Ice is hot these days, thanks to an explosion in the popularity of recreational skating, ice hockey and figure skating.

“We usually experience surges in popularity of ice sports just preceding and following a Winter Olympics, then it curves down again,” said Peter Martell, vice president of the Ice Skating Institute of America.

“But not this time. We’ve been waiting three years and there’s been no waning interest,” said Martell, whose Illinois-based group represents 125,000 rink owners, builders, suppliers, skaters and skating instructors.

Reasons for the ice boom vary. Martell believes back-to-back winter Olympics in 1992 and 1994 kept the sport in the public eye. The 1994 Games also featured the Tonya Harding vs. Nancy Kerrigan soap opera.

Morry Stillwell, president of the U.S. Figure Skating Association, believes the growth was driven mostly by increased television exposure.

“Everyone likes to say that the Harding-Kerrigan incident kicked it off. I tend not to believe that,” Stillwell said. “I think a combination of CBS losing NFL football, the baseball strike, followed by a hockey strike left a very large block of sport time to fill.”

Ice skating proved to be a ratings cash cow. Networks discovered that adult women with plenty of disposable income were the prime--and very desirable--demographic.

“I think it was a hidden jewel,” said Rob Correa, vice president of programming for CBS Sports, “and it’s finally getting the exposure it deserves.”

Correa wouldn’t say whether skating fills the huge hole left when CBS lost its NFL contract two seasons ago. But, he acknowledged, “It offers a terrific counterpart to predominately male sport events on the weekends.”

The networks will pay more than $60 million to run figure skating events this year, double what they paid six years ago, Stillwell said.

There also has been more televised hockey, an unprecedented recreational hockey expansion and the continuing growth of in-line skating (about 20% a year)--a short hop to ice sports.

Today, there are six National Hockey League teams and 13 minor league hockey teams in warm-weather cities. Ice rinks are popping up in the most unusual places, from Hawaii to Houston to Huntsville, Ala. Between 25 and 50 rinks have been built in the last year, industry experts estimate.

Japan, Australia, Mexico, South Africa and many South American countries are all gliding along, too, says Stillwell. “It’s not nearly as dramatic as in the U.S., but it is happening all over,” he said.

The downside to America’s ice affair is the shortage of rinks.

Industry officials estimate there are about 2,100 indoor skating rinks and arenas in the United States. “To meet the demand right now, we’d need another 1,500 at least,” said Bryant McBride, who is in charge of research and development for the NHL.

“The need for ice in the United States is absolutely critical,” McBride says. “People are out there playing at 3 in the morning because it’s the only time they can get.”

To put it in perspective: “There are 29 million people in Canada and 5,500 ice rinks,” he says. “In California, there are 29 million people and 60 ice rinks.”

And they pay dearly. Amateur hockey teams pay as much as $350 for an hour of ice time in southern California, as opposed to about $110 an hour in Boston, McBride says.

“In the last three years I’ve been absolutely amazed at the number of rinks put up,” Stillwell says. “They’re just multiplying like crazy all over the country.”

That leaves Jim Harnett of C.W. Davis/Ice Pro, one of the nation’s leading rink construction companies, with a big smile.

“Last year was the busiest year we’ve had,” says Harnett, whose Syracuse, N.Y.-based company has been in the business 70 years. “If you were looking at a graph, you’d see a steady climb over the last 10 years and then a sudden vertical leap right off the page.”

Today’s rinks aren’t the refrigerated ice boxes of yore. They’re super rinks, complete with fitness centers, child care facilities, arcades, restaurants, birthday party rooms, conference centers, even heated bleacher sections. Some are built inside shopping malls, giving kids something to do while parents shop.

“The people who are building rinks now are business people,” Harnett says. “It’s no longer the former figure skater or hockey player or local rink rat turned manager. It’s all about entertainment. We’re competing for every dollar being spent at bowling alleys and movie theaters.”

In Manhattan, the Sky Rink at Chelsea Piers is packed any day kids are off from school. Some Saturdays, people have to be turned away from the two rinks.

On one recent day, a blond, ponytailed Eva Cartell--decked out in an emerald, fur-trimmed skating outfit--practiced her twirls and spins among hundreds much more unsteady than her.

“Please, mommy, please. Let’s go back,” she whined, tugging her mother’s sleeve during a short break.

“She’d be here 24 hours a day, if she could,” her mother, Mary, said as she was led back to the ice.

The New England Sports Center in Marlboro, Mass., believed to be the largest in the country, has four 200-by-85 foot rinks, 24 locker rooms, a shopping center, entertainment center with pool and air hockey tables and four fitness centers. The crowning touch is a 265-foot skylight running the length of the second-floor ceiling.

Still, “We turn quite a few programs away,” Wes Tuttle, the rink’s general manager, said of the year-round, four acre, $12 million facility. “There’s still not enough ice time to go around.”

One weekend, a black-tie banquet for 280 people was held upstairs while four different high school state championship games were played on the ice.

The last rink development boom occurred in the 1970s, but only in the traditional cold-weather markets. Most went bust as a result of the energy crisis and exorbitant operating costs.

Today’s rinks are much more efficient, from the no-maintenance dasher boards (the siding that hockey players and skaters dread) to humidity controls which eliminate the need for hockey players to skate furiously to lift the indoor fog.

A single rink costs about $2 million-$3 million to build. A double--the most practical and biggest moneymaker--costs $3 million-$5 million.

With all the changes, there’s no need to fish the blades out of the basement each season. It’s now a year-round sport.

“It’s as big as Little League was in its heyday,” insists Mike Manna of the Staten Island Skating Pavillion. “Drive down suburban streets and you’ll see hockey nets, blades and pucks everywhere.”

With the introduction of the first Olympic women’s hockey team and a hockey Dream Team in the 1998 Winter Games, the NHL’s McBride expects an even bigger boom coming.

“In 1999 and the year 2000 it’s going to get downright scary. Just look at the numbers,” he says. “Figure skating already crushes nearly everyone on TV, hockey just keeps expanding, now you’re going to have these little girls sitting at home watching women play hockey in the Olympics. . . . People will just be clamoring for ice time.”

But replace Little League?

“Who can say,” says the admittedly ice-biased McBride. “But to be inside a cool ice rink in Florida, in August, instead of on a ball field--that’s not such a bad thing.”