Cold Winter Brings Latest Iteration of a Growing Hockey Tradition Deep in Lemont

It’s cold in Lemont as the moon rises over Mount Nittany and William Dickson inspects the homemade hockey rink in his backyard, prodding at the ice underneath his feet.

“It’s about seven inches thick here,” he remarks, the deepest part of the rink that will soon see almost a dozen skaters ranging in ages of just a few years old to nearly in their teens take to the ice.

For Dickson, this has become a labor of love – perhaps the only way that someone comes up with the idea of pulling together that much water, that much time and that many late nights to maintain the rink. You don’t do that unless you truly love the idea and truly love the game. Although, as he is quick to point out, this idea was his brothers’ and like all brothers do, Dickson one-upped his.

“It was hard to get ice time [during COVID],” Dickson says, motioning to the kids currently on the ice playing a casual game, occasionally sending a puck over the boards and into the yard. Tonight it’s a collection of Dickson’s own kids and others. There are dads here because how does one turn down the prospect of a fire, some beers and some hockey?

It’s in all of this where something unintentionally pure about this project – which has grown in the past few years from a square located in a different part of the yard – has been created. Across the hockey world each country brings something different to the table. Canadians are better skaters; Europeans often better with the stick; Americans stuck somewhere in the middle. The barrier of entry for hockey has always been high. You need a rink. You need equipment. You almost always need to drive somewhere else and drive somewhere early.

But what if the rink was in your backyard? What if the ice was right there? What if the cold wasn’t so hard to find? That’s how you grow the game, one kid at a time. It’s a little more complex than playing soccer or tossing around a baseball, but the concept is the same.

Take for example the youngest of the Dickson’s kids currently on the ice. His name is Atticus, just a few years old and he probably skates as well as you do. It’s a shuffle, not short on the occasional fall, but he is fearless and holding his own as he plods around the ice with his stick.

And without a rink in his backyard, he may have been many years older the day he finally touched the ice.

Of course one frozen rink buried deep in central Pennsylvania is not going to change the game. All the same, just a few miles from Pegula Ice Arena in a town situated in the intersection of so many NHL fan bases, there is something natural about seeing a little pond hockey during a winter that has been so cold that you could squint and swear you were in Minnesota.

“I bring the hot chocolate,” Dickson’s wife Misty says with a laugh. “He’ll be out here until 12:30-1 a.m. taking care of the rink.”

As the weather gets warmer, the rink will go by the wayside, stacked up and put away until next winter comes. That time might be soon as February slowly turns into March, but in the meanwhile Dickson and company will squeeze in as many skating sessions as they can. By the time the cold rolls around again Atticus will be that much bigger, that much older, and perhaps that much better of a skater.

And yes, maybe he isn’t en route to becoming the next Auston Matthews, but every great skater started early, so who is to say he won’t be?