This Canadian lab is aiming to change the game
By Kerry GillespieSports Reporter, and Dave FeschukSports Columnist
Amy Laski didn’t set out to start a hockey program for girls, but ended up with one because she couldn’t find what she wanted for her daughters.
Her Toronto skills development program has been specifically designed with girls in mind and maintains a laser focus on keeping sports fun, two things Hockey Canada is also looking at in a broad effort to remove barriers holding back the female game from greater growth.
But the Tween Girls’ Hockey League nearly folded in its third year because of one of the biggest and least-studied barriers of all: access to ice time.
The availability of ice during prime-time hours affects almost everyone in the sport — raising player fees, forcing families to drive long distances to rinks and limiting participation — but it impacts women and girls disproportionally compared to men and boys.
That’s because historic ice-time contracts that predominately serve men and boys make it hard for newer groups to get a fair share of the sought-after weekday evening and weekend time slots.
This is how Hockey Canada’s discussion paper on the status of women’s and girls’ hockey puts the problem: “To date, there is no ice equity access policy in Canada, which has resulted in ice time managed at the local level being given priority to groups with agreements that often pre-date the creation of women’s and girls’ hockey programs in their respective communities.”
The Future of Hockey Lab, created to help make the sport more accessible and inclusive, is looking to bring public transparency to who uses rinks — where, when and why — in a bid to make ice allocation across the country more efficient and equitable.
Lindsey MacIntosh, the research lead on the project called Open Ice, says this is a long-standing problem in Canada but no one has gathered the data to really understand the impact of the main allocation method in use: “It’s your ice time until you tell us it’s not.”
“I can get every stat I want on Sidney Crosby — where he shoots the puck the most from, what colour his laces are, I can find out everything,” MacIntosh said. “I cannot tell you where people are playing across the country.”
Open Ice is starting to collect data on the age and gender of ice users, their activity (hockey, figure skating, etc.) and whether it’s competition or practice, and the time of day. Better understanding who is using ice in municipal and private rinks and when will allow municipalities, arena operators and policymakers to improve scheduling, reduce vacancies and increase access and equity, she said. In other words, make sports better for everyone.
That is, of course, easier said than done.
“Technically I have a data project, a technology product, but there’s a heck of a lot of behaviour change that is actually associated with it, so it’s difficult,” MacIntosh said, adding that many people don’t want to mess with the status quo of ice-time contracts.
The project is underway in the Future of Hockey Lab’s home base of Nova Scotia and is expected to expand across Canada in 2026, she said.
Already, though, they are getting data from the Ford Performance Centre in Toronto, the practice facility for the Maple Leafs, Marlies and Sceptres, and home to the Etobicoke Dolphins, a vast program for women and girls that’s been there since the four-pad building opened in 2009. Graham Cocking, the facility’s executive director, is excited about the potential to “shine a light” on prime-time ice use across the country.
“Are we really reflecting the community in terms of who we allocate ice to? It’s an interesting question to ask and, you know, until Lindsey brought it to my attention I don’t know if anybody in my position ever asked themselves that question,” Cocking said.
“I’ve been here for 10 years and you inherit, from the person that was here before you, an ice plan that was put together who knows even how many years before that … We still have ice user groups that were on that ice from 40 or 50 years ago. They’ve always had Thursday night at 7 p.m.,” he said, noting such arrangements date back to the facility’s original Lakeshore Lions single-pad arena.
The sport, though, has changed dramatically over those decades. According to Hockey Canada registration data back to 1990, there were 8,000 female players in the entire country then and now there’s more than six times that number in Ontario alone. Hockey Canada registrations for men and boys peaked a decade ago at 552,000 and was at 479,000 last season, while participation by women and girls continues to rise, hitting over 108,000 last season.
And that number would be higher if not for the limiting factor of a chronic lack of ice time, says Fran Rider, president of the Ontario Women’s Hockey Association, which has some 40,000 players.
“If we could get some more infrastructure in the arenas and get more of an equitable allocation of ice time, our numbers would go even higher,” Rider said. “This year alone we’ve had many, many players turned away because there’s not enough ice time.”
The Hockey Canada women’s and girls’ steering committee has identified barriers that need to be overcome to better serve players and reach the organization’s goal of having more than 170,000 female players by 2030. Their discussion paper, designed to get Canadians and policymakers talking, includes hockey-wide issues such as high costs, governance concerns, the need to engage with new Canadians and under-represented groups and retain youth by keeping the sport fun, and many other problems that are specific to the female game, including girls and women trailing boys and men in funding, staffing and media attention, stereotypes and ice-time inequities.
“We would love to see that growth rate,” Rider said. “And as the credibility of the women’s game grows, we do see the numbers increasing, but we need to make sure that we’ve got the ice time to get that. We have a lot more difficulty getting municipal ice for the girls and oftentimes they have to go out and pay higher costs at private arenas. And that escalates the cost of the women’s game as well.” In some cases, they have shortened game times to deal with a lack of ice.
Over the years, plenty of battles over ice time have hit the pages of newspapers, but there’s never been a comprehensive picture of what’s happening in the more than 2,900 indoor rinks across Canada.
When Open Ice expands its work across the country and makes aggregate data public, government and the private sector will have “actionable insight” into how to best use existing ice, where it makes sense to refurbish aging arenas or possibly even invest in new facilities, MacIntosh said.
Marin Hickox, Hockey Canada’s vice-president of girls’ and women’s hockey, says a strategy is needed to align with other ice sports in lobbying government and private sector to build more arenas.
“It’s not just a hockey issue. It is an ice issue and a facilities issue that we need to tackle together,” she said.
But Cocking cautions that the demand for prime-time ice doesn’t make arena building or expansion an economic slam dunk.
“Everybody thinks that, well, if there’s more demand, why don’t you build more facilities?” he said.
“If somehow, magically, we could add another pad of ice here, yeah, it would satisfy a lot of the demand between 5 and 9 p.m. The challenge for operators is the cost that I have to incur for all those other hours to provide that service … My hydro bill for electricity last month was $100,000. People get upset that ice is so expensive, but they don’t realize the input costs to keep ice available for them during prime time.”
Prime-time ice is 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. on weekdays and 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. on weekends. Cocking calls 5 to 9 p.m. weekday ice “the prime time of prime-time ice.”
At the Ford Performance Centre, prime-time ice costs $540 an hour with tax — that’s around double what a Toronto youth group would pay for ice in a taxpayer-subsidized municipal arena.
That facility also has the benefit of the Leafs, Marlies, Sceptres and a high-performance figure skating program that all pay for daytime ice to keep the centre in use around the clock.
“There’s a lot of municipalities that basically have the lights shut off until the arena operator arrives at 4 p.m. to start getting ready for his day,” Cocking said.
That’s why he thinks any strategy to build more rinks needs to go well beyond ice sports to include other community needs such as libraries, community kitchens and indoor recreation space for cricket, pickleball and other sports.
“There’s probably a portion of the community that sees these facilities as underutilized, especially if you’re a taxpayer and you’re subsidizing hockey ice rates and you’re, like, I don’t even play hockey,” he said. “I think cities have to go through a process of not only thinking about where these fit in terms of their infrastructure (plans), but how do we allocate the ice. Who gets access? Why?”
Those are the very questions that Laski started asking in 2023 when she tried, and initially failed, to get three hours of ice time from the city on a weeknight in her league’s North York area for seven- to 15-year-old girls. (For the program’s first two years, Laski subletted ice from a group with a long-standing city contract.)
She discovered that Toronto collects data on its ice users, including gender, but doesn’t use that information to address historical concerns or advance the city’s equity and inclusion policies.
The bulk of prime-time ice in city arenas is reserved for youth: 60 per cent for community youth groups and 25 per cent for competitive youth leagues. Adult groups get 14 per cent and junior hockey and commercial enterprises each get 0.5 per cent.
Download PDFThe front page of the Toronto Star on Nov. 11, 2009, had an exclusive story on the Toronto Leaside Girls’ Hockey Association threatening a human-rights complaint over ice access.
Laski threatened to take the matter to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario if the city didn’t find suitable ice for her group and address “discriminatory” ice-allocation policies. (In that, she was following in the footsteps of the Toronto Leaside Girls’ Hockey Association, which threatened a human-rights complaint in 2009 over ice access.) After the Toronto Star and other media wrote about the tween hockey group’s plight, the city managed to find the ice time it needed.
And in February 2024, council directed staff to conduct an internal review of the booking and operating procedures for ice time, as well as cricket fields, and other sports facilities to determine whether city policies “provide fair and equitable access to sports and recreation assets, particularly for start-up female groups and other users,” said city communications co-ordinator Alexandra Dinsmore.
With 2025-26 seasonal ice permits coming next month, Laski wishes the city was moving more quickly to rectify historical wrongs: “You can do something now. You collect the data; use the data.”
Still, she’s hopeful that something good will come out of this, and that no other girls’ group will be faced with giving up or fighting for ice the way she has, and others before her.
“We’re the largest municipality in Canada, so if we can put something out there and get a policy stated, even if it needs refinement, that’s a big precedent for other municipalities. And there’s many of them struggling with similar issues.”
Kerry Gillespie is a Toronto-based sports reporter for the Star. Reach her via email: kgillespie@thestar.ca.
Dave Feschuk is a Toronto-based sports columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitte
