Director of ice operations Matt Messer tells us a little bit about how he maintains downtown Edmonton’s community rink.

Matt Messer didn’t plan on making ice his career, but much like many Canadians, he eventually found his way back to the rink. As the director of ice operations for the Oilers Entertainment Group, he takes care of the ice at the Downtown Community Arena (DCA). He’s been around rinks for a while now. “My dad made ice, so I grew up around a rink, pretty much growing up in a rink that was down in Calgary,” he told us. 

“I quit one job that I really didn’t like doing, and I needed a job, and I went and got a job at a local rink, and I was like, this isn’t too bad. I kind of like this. So I just kind of rolled with that and just kept progressing and progressing. And here I am now.” 

These days, he preps and maintains the ice that Edmonton’s premiere hockey teams practice and play on. Messer said his team takes two to three hours to prepare the ice for a hockey game. 

The DCA is a unique rink. It’s a fixture of downtown Edmonton since Rogers Place opened, it’s the Oilers’ practice ice, and the Griffins home arena. It also serves as a public skate facility. At their peaks on weekends, the DCA attracts around 80 to 100 people according to a host at the rink. 

“I quit one job that I really didn’t like doing, and I needed a job, and I went and got a job at a local rink, and I was like, this isn’t too bad. I kind of like this. So I just kind of rolled with that and just kept progressing and progressing. And here I am now.”

–Matt Messer, Director of Ice Operations at OEG

The Griff visited a public skating session in November. Visitors enjoyed the rink by doing some figure skating, races, and learning what a C cut is. The DCA provides a sense of community that is natural with public rinks, just like any other type of sporting surface.

Messer takes a unique type of care with the public ice. With professionals, it’s all about regulation and standards. “We’ll do ice maintenance, which is where we’ll edge the ice, bring the edges down.” This refers to the process of whittling down the built up ice and snow on the boards. “Then we’ll flood one or two times, just to keep the ice from drying out.”

Zambonis circle the DCA constantly, ready to refresh the ice for the next event. If that event is casual, Messer thinks less about rules and more about safety and inclusion. 

“We’ll just make sure that we try to fill in as many grooves as we can from the group before. It all depends on how much time we have between groups as well. If it’s fifteen minutes, we’re limited to what we can do. If we have half an hour, we can do a little bit of extra work, but for like a community rink skate, we just want to make sure that it’s as smooth as it can be, because we have such a broad range of skill sets. You have people there skating their entire lives, who just enjoy skating, and then you have people that are using that time to come out and learn to skate, basically.”

Each new sheet of ice comes with the same philosophy. “My personal motto is that everybody should get the same quality. So if we’re making NHL quality, we should try to make that for everybody. Obviously, like I said, we do have some limitations based on how much prep time we might have, but on a day to day, like, the bar that we’re trying to attain is high,” Messer said.

Most Canadians could probably give an answer as to what the rink means to them. For some, it may be a leisurely pastime. For others, a battlefield for the sports they love. Some may even tie in the commonplace existence of rinks to their own Canadian identity. For Messer, the answer was as personal as it could be.

“My parents met working at the Saddledome,” he mused. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for ice rinks.”