Days of Figure 8s Are Numbered
The Ice Chalet, a Costa Mesa skating rink that since the 1970s has been the training site for a long line of world-class and professional skaters, is closing for good this month.
The rink’s owners informed stunned parents, coaches and skaters this week of the Jan. 28 closure, saying the aging facility--the oldest and at one time the only rink in Orange County--no longer attracts as many skaters as it once did.
The 27-year-old rink still boasts world-class coaches and skating students, including Olympic coach John Nicks and national championship skaters Sasha Cohen, 16, of Laguna Niguel and Naomi Nari Nam, 15, of Irvine--all of whom are heading to the national championships in Boston next week. But the outdated rink could no longer compete with newer, state-of-the-art facilities, many in the business said Thursday.
In its time, the Ice Chalet was the training home to several prominent skaters, including the Olympic pairs team of Jenni Meno and Todd Sand. Cohen is the defending U.S. national silver medalist, and Nam was at one time hailed as a figure skating prodigy when she finished second in the 1999 U.S. championships at 13.
The Ice Chalet’s closing comes just five months after the Irvine Ice Arena shut its doors in after filing for bankruptcy. Ice Chalets Inc. still owns 13 other arenas throughout the nation--one of them in Orange County, Aliso Viejo--and says it has no plans to close any of those rinks.
Ron White, president of the California Ice Rink Owners Assn., said both the Irvine and Costa Mesa rinks were outdated. But, he insists, the ice skating industry is still hot.
“Back in the early ‘70s, there used to be several ice rinks in Orange County, but they all closed except for the Ice Chalet,” he said.
Ice Chalet in Costa Mesa remained the only rink in the county until White opened his Glacial Gardens rinks in Anaheim in 1990. Since then, there has been a major influx in ice skating rinks--expanded to include bleachers, party rooms and even showers--partly because of the growing popularity of ice hockey, he said.
Even without the Ice Chalet in Costa Mesa, Orange County still has five ice skating arenas, with Glacial Gardens and Disney Ice in Anaheim, Ice Chalet in Aliso Viejo, the Skate Zone in Huntington Beach and Ice Palace in Westminster, White added. Most of them are less than 10 years old.
Jan Miller, marketing director for Ice Chalets Inc., said the number of public skaters using the Costa Mesa rink dropped in recent years as the condition of the Mesa Verde shopping center on Harbor Boulevard also declined. The company tried to get the rink included in a recent renovation of the center, owned by the Segerstrom family’s Mesa Verde Partners, but the two sides failed to reach an agreement. Ice Chalets Inc. owns its building, while Segerstrom owns the land it sits on.
Paul Freeman, a spokesman for the Segerstrom partnership, said Ice Chalet did not show any interest in making long-term plans for the property and was therefore not included in the revitalization. “They came to us and wanted out of their lease early, and we accommodated them,” he said.
Claudine Mascia, school director at the Ice Chalet, was heartbroken by the news. “I love this company, and I love this rink,” she said. Her association with the rink began when she was a student in the late 1970s. She performed professionally before returning to teach. “It’s been a great place to skate.”
Nicks has been training champions at the Costa Mesa rink for 20 of the 40 years he has been coaching. He said he was sad about the closing but saw it as a chance to open new doors for his skaters.
“The heartbreak is sentimental rather than pragmatic,” he said. “The facility here was not in particularly good shape. . . . In some ways, wherever these skaters choose to go it might be a new and exciting opportunity for them.”
The rink’s hockey teams and 250 students will be reassigned to the Ice Chalet in Aliso Viejo, or they can transfer to the Ice Palace in Westminster. Most Ice Chalet employees will be offered other positions within the company, Miller said.
Parent Claudia Gardner was upset by the news, saying her 11-year-old daughter, Stephanie, skates in Costa Mesa almost every day.
“The place is in bad shape,” she said. “It needs to be torn down and started over. But we weren’t complaining. We took it as it was. We were just happy there was an ice rink in Costa Mesa.”
She said she plans to transfer Stephanie to classes in Aliso Viejo but added that other parents may not be able to drive the extra distance to get there. “A lot of people are very, very unhappy about this,” she said. “My daughter cried.”
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Times staff writer Chris Foster contributed to this report.