Ann Arbor Ice Cube
2121 Oak Valley DriveI have to guess by now you’ve figured out my kids are figure skaters. L is in her second full year of individual competitions and B will be starting to compete at the end of July.
Like a lot of parents, we spend a lot of our free time and weekends at our kids’ sporting events.
Unlike a lot of parents, we’re not at soccer fields or baseball/softball diamonds.
We’re at ice rinks.
Since March, J and L have already been to East Lansing and Flossmor, IL to compete. She has at least six competitions this year before the end of July…maybe 7…and hopefully a spot at a national competition in Chicago is September.
I don’t spend as much time at the rink as J does. Her job is a little more flexible and I’m not trusted to get hair, make up and costume right after a….mishap last year in Traverse City when J couldn’t go. Wasn’t a big deal. I got the hair right. L just put one of her dresses on backwards and neither I, L, or her coaches could figure it out.
I got thinking when we were in Ann Arbor. Why don’t I ever blog about the ice rinks we go to for competitions….especially when they have food. I blog about sports venues a lot..whether I eat at said venues or not. So, I decided I’ll start including the ice rinks we spend many of our weekends at as part of the blog.
First up, the Ann Arbor Ice Cube.
The Ann Arbor Ice Cube is on Oak Valley Road near Scio Church Road on the southwest side of Ann Arbor. It’s near the I-94 exit at Ann Arbor-Saline Road but you have to back track a little bit to get there. The ice arena is actully located in Pittsfield Charter Township just outside of the Ann Arbor city limits.
The ice rink, which they very cleverly shorten to A2Ice3, has three rinks. The large rink is the Stadium rink. This one is where a lot of the upper level hockey is played including Eastern Michigan University’s ACHA team. For this competition, the Margaret Faulkner Springtime Invitational, it’s where a lot of the higher level skating was. We’d pop in there occasionally to watch some of the older, way more advanced competitors do their free skates.
The other two rinks are down a hallway. We spent a lot of time on The Olympic Rink. This is where the Ann Arbor Figure Skating Club does most of their work. There were a lot of banners hanging in the arena from the national finishes including banners for two pairs of ice dancers who have gone on to skate in the Olympics. Evan Bates and Emily Samuelson represented the US at the 2010 Olympics then Bates partnered with Madison Chock and represented the US in the 2014, 2018, and 2022 Olympics. This was the rink L skated all four of her events in so we spent a lot of time in and out here. It’s cool to for the girls to see the national figure skating banners around the rink (including the Hockettes banners…as a lot of the girls also do synchro). A lot of places they skate is all about hockey so it’s cool to see when figure skating accomplishments are celebrated so publicly. This rink had a pretty big seating area too and they actually had the heaters on….something most rinks don’t do for some reason, so it was actually reasonably warm inside the rink.
The third rink is the Varsity Rink. This is the smallest of the three rinks and was used for practice. L was in there a few times but we had to watch her from the hallway overlooking the rink. They didn’t let parents downstairs where the locker rooms are and that was the only way to get to the limited seating in the Varsity rink.
The common space of the three rinks is pretty large. We got there early on Thursday morning and J found some of the other mom’s already claiming a table. This was the area vendors were set up and the area where you could sit and eat and not be in the bleachers.
This is one of the rink we go to that has a snack bar and it’s open during the competition. It isn’t anything fancy but they do have stuff to snack on. There were some signs for personal pizzas and soft pretzels but we most stuck to the candy and pop snacks that we usually do. B didn’t go with us on Thursday but we had to go back Sunday for one event and he went to that one. They had Dippin’ Dots so he had to get some of those. Throughout the weekend, we grabbed Cokes and Gatorades instead of using the vending machines that were scattered around the hallways.
The Ann Arbor Ice Cube is definitely one of the better rinks we’ve been to so far. We’re still pretty new to the figure skating circuit in Michigan and there are still some rinks we’re making first time visits to (this one was a first time this year). Some of the competitions we’ve been to are really tight for space and they don’t offer any kind of snack options…so I usually have to make gas station runs. I like that the space never really felt too crowded despite there being A LOT of skaters there and that they had a really well stocked snack bar to keep us going during the long breaks between skates.
SW Michigan Dining 