The Bigler Rinks

If you go out the back of my dorm, turn right on the sidewalk, left up Shortlidge Road, right on Pollock and then left up Bigler, you'll get to a bunch of athletic fields and the Bigler Rinks, which is where we played all of our roller hockey games.

So I think the most ridiculously notable thing about the Bigler Rinks was the parking situation. They were actually in a fairly inconvenient spot for like 80% of the people that played, and considering how much stuff you have to bring with you to play hockey, that's kind of a problem. Specifically if you are a goalie. So if you were across the street from the rink complex and walked into it, first you'd cross a regular old sidewalk like they have all over campus. Then there's a few yards of grass with maybe a tree or two, and a couple yards of it are paved. After this couple yard strip is a tall fence, maybe twelve feet. After that, everything is paved. There are two rinks side by side inside that, set about about twenty feet from the fence. There's a shack on the right and a referee's post in the middle, and ofter there are construction vehicles inside, and a dirt pile on the right for some reason we can't really figure out. In either case, posted on the fence is a sign that says NO PARKING BEYOND THIS POINT. So you are actually allowed to park on the grass outside the fence and the little strip of pavement leading into the rinks, but not in the large swath of pavement inside the rink area where only hockey players go.

However, people still park there regularly. They did it like all season. And basically every other time someone would do it, the parking fairy would come around and start writing tickets. Every time this happened, someone on the bench would yell, "Yo, dude, you're getting a ticket," at which point the person would scream obscenities and then hassle the ticket fairy. Then they would try to stop the game, which sometimes happened and sometimes did not, so that they could go move their car. Sometimes they got a ticket, sometimes not. Sometimes they were threatened to have their car towed, but I don't think this ever happened. Whenever they did move their car so as to not recieve a ticket, they'd have to take it a way away before they could come back which seriously screwed up their playing. Alternatively, they would have a friend with shoes on who just came to watch the game move their car for them, which I'm sure their friends all loved?

At the back end of the Bigler Rinks was a fence, then a little strip of land, then another fence, and then a whole lot of construction areas. On the right of the rink was a raised mulch bed, which we also couldn't figure out, and then a fence and more construction. It really sucked to hit the ball into just about any of these places. If you hit it past the second construction fence, it was basically gone forever. If you hit it past the first fence you'd have to wait until you could get someone with shoes to get it for you. Sometimes you would just declare it not worth it and go for it later.

The rinks themselves were pretty terrible. The surface was very torn up and ripped and just absolutely destroyed your wheels. Like, it was probably as bad as rollerskating on gravel. Plus they rinks were a beach. There was just sand and dust everywhere, and if you've ever skated on anything like that, you know how dangerous and scary it is to come into a turn over sand at full speed knowing that no matter what, something is about to go very wrong. There were also holes in the board where kids sticks would get stuck regularly. Fortunately no one ever impaled themselves on their stick in the process, although I'm sure it's happened or is going to happen sometime. The ball bounced everywhere because of the tears in the surface which was really annoying, but it goes both ways I guess. The boards were shaky and the doors didn't close all the way about 90% of the time.

There were also holes in the nets which made for a number of questionable referring decisions across the board, but oh well, it happens. Nick, our goalie, asked at the end of the season why no one would just invest in a nice net or two for the two goals we had so that there wouldn't be any question anymore, and Tim told him it was because they were going to tear down the rinks next year to make a parking lot for a new medical center. But maybe they would build us new ones somewhere.

Peace out.