Lincolnshire’s North Park has had a free ice rink for months, and to promote it, Lee Fell has organized a winter-time event for this weekend.
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“The idea is to get people outside in North Park, and let them know that there’s an ice rink up there,” he said.
Fell, the director of travel baseball for the Lincolnshire Sports Association, is promoting the Lincolnshire Skate Nights, the first organized events to be held at Village Hall’s year-old outdoor ice skating rink.
Currently set for 7-10 p.m. on both Jan. 9 and Jan. 23, the programs are essentially an open house for the outdoor rink in North Park, on the southeast corner of Riverwoods and Everett roads.
The program will include free rental of ice skates, free hot chocolate, free s’mores and free coffee, plus fire pits for warming and hay bales to sit on — and, if all goes well, a fireworks show after the Jan. 9 event.
Food trucks will be set up as well, with warm meals for sale at the vendors’ usual prices. The event is not a fundraiser for anyone, because admission is free, Fell said. The intent is just to get more people to know about, and use, the always-free, lit-at-night rink —and, hopefully, to start a tradition of a winter community activity in a village that holds numerous outdoor programs during the warmer seasons.
“It’s going to be a learning curve for us,” Fell said of the first-time event. “We want to keep the community-type events going.”
For these two events, LSA volunteers will direct on-ice traffic and assist the non-skating visitors, he said.
Village Hall set the 150-by-80-foot rink up about a year ago, Fell said. During the months when it was operable, he often saw pickup hockey games and, at other times, ice skaters practicing their moves. He guessed that it could safely hold 100 users at a time, and hoped to get close to that capacity during the Lincolnshire Skate Nights.
Much of that will depend, of course, on the weather, which this winter is doubly hard to predict. Fell noted that part of why Lincolnshire’s rink is free is because it has no special equipment or care to keep its surface icy.
“It definitely has to be below freezing,” he said. “We’ll need some kind of deep freeze to make ice. That’s out of my control.”
What has been in his control, though, is attracting donations of food and services from the Fresh Market, Sunset Foods, Glacier Ice Arena in Vernon Hills and Johnny Rockets Fireworks, which puts on shows around the suburbs. Fell thanked several other volunteers in the LSA, plus Village Hall’s public works staff, for getting the program off the ground.
“It takes a community to put a community event on,” he said.
Should the weather be too hot or too cold, the LSA has scheduled make-up dates for Jan. 30 and Feb. 6.
Twitter: @RonnieAtPioneer