Image courtesy of Outdoor Hockey Club
This morning when writing this, I walked outside to go on my commute to work. It was still dark out, and I could see my breath. It’s getting cold outside. For far too many of us, this is dreadful. For those part of the Outdoor Hockey Club, it means the ice hockey season is about to start.
This month we talked with Randy Frykas, founder of the Outdoor Hockey Club (OHC) and award-winning filmmaker who has toured across the U.S. and Canada. Outdoor Hockey Club started back in 2020, with Randy leaving OHC pucks wherever he spotted signs of outdoor hockey and has grown with the ICEMAKERS documentary. Randy talked about his love for outdoor hockey and how “Canada is a winter country, and if you don’t do anything in the winter, then those months can be pretty difficult.”
He also discussed how it is a different sensation playing outside in the cold. “If it’s minus 20 or minus 5, the skates cut through the ice differently. The stick and the puck sound different.”
Outdoor hockey is simple. The conditions that make it possible, however, aren’t.
One of those conditions that make outdoor hockey possible is those who make the rinks. Randy over the course of four winters spent time in the dark for the ICEMAKERS filming. He detailed the feeling of being outside with the icemakers as a “special calmness”. Some of us may still wonder why go out in the dark cold alone for hours to make ice. Especially when “A majority of icemakers don’t even skate on them. They just make them.”
But the reward is bigger than just one person.
“Their pay is seeing and hearing a busy rink.”
Image courtesy of Outdoor Hockey Club
This work brings outdoor hockey players from across neighborhoods to a shared community space. Randy described Eric Reder’s rink on the Seine River, Manitoba: “He leaves a whole bunch of sticks in the snowbanks… They’ll just pick up the sticks and play for a bit, and put it back, and pay him back by shovelling a little bit, and then carry on with their day.”
It's this shared space that “brings strangers together, it brings the community together, it’s a focal point for small towns or people in big cities to get together.”
Climate Change Conditions
This community and winter exercise activity, however, is under threat. Randy shares “the predictability of winter weather is now getting in the way of some rinks.”
A 2012 Environmental Research Letters study found the outdoor skating season shrank by up to 20% in many areas from 1951–2005. Researcher Robert McLeman also projects Toronto and Montreal could lose about a third of their season by the end of this century.
Randy didn’t plan to make a film about icemakers at all, let alone climate change, but the story was apparent through the footage he gathered. And it makes sense. “Who better to talk to than the people who are outside every single night in the winter?”
Randy has also found that climate change conversations resonate more to folks “when they’re framed in the hockey context”. A rink that isn’t flooded until New Years means the missed opportunity of not having the rink to play on. It means something to everyday people that a chart cannot. That’s what ICEMAKERS sets out to show.
Outdoor Hockey Club membership
For outdoor ice hockey to work, not only do conditions require cold weather and an icemaker, but also Outdoor Hockey Club members. Being in Canada, a country known for how seriously it takes hockey, it can be hard to pick up a stick.
“If you feel like you don’t have really good skates or a really good stick, you might feel like, maybe I shouldn’t go.”
If that is you, there’s good news. To be a part of the Outdoor Hockey Club, “there’s no tryouts, there’s no registration fees. You don’t have to buy expensive gear. If you want to try hockey, you’re in the club.” Randy started the Outdoor Hockey Club to “show that if you love hockey or are interested in hockey, then that’s all that matters.” The point is to help others “really see hockey or skating at its purest.”
We believe that Outdoor Hockey Club shows the right to play, sport and movement in action. It’s ideas like these that show that movement often relies on conditions that often get overlooked. It depends on cold winters, people who spend hours making ice and the community that builds a culture in which anyone can grab a stick to play. Protecting and promoting those conditions is part of what a rights based approach to sport is.
When asked about next steps for Outdoor Hockey Club, Randy said he is “trying not to put it in a box. I want to let it grow and let it be what it might come to be.” For now, Randy is just following the puck.
So… congrats on being accepted into the Outdoor Hockey Club! You can join fellow club members in attending an upcoming screening of ICEMAKERS in a city near you.
Dates and locations for the ICEMAKERS screening tour will be released in November 2026. Visit the OHC website for more information. Also give Outdoor Hockey Club a follow on Instagram, and Youtube.
