Home ice A Manitoba family turns a 90-year-old barn into a Prairie hockey oasis By: Ben Waldman Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Friday, Mar. 18, 2022

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This article was published 17/03/2022 (916 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

HAMIOTA — The puck glides into the corner, and Sam and Matt Rawlings chase it. At seven years old, Sam is bigger and a lot faster than his five-year-old brother, but the little boy is determined. He loves to fight for the puck in the corners, where only a few years ago, there was no sheet of ice, only ancient piles of sheep manure.

In sports parlance, a classic arena is often referred to as the “Old Barn.” At the Rawlings family’s acreage in Hamiota, it is not just a metaphor.

The Rawlings boys are skating in an actual old barn, built nearly a century ago, where farmers once kept sheep, not score. On the wall of the loft above the rink is etched a tally of how many bundles of flax were harvested in 1932. Inside the heated dressing room, the Rawlings brothers use a pencil to track how many times they’ve skated on their very own home ice, which had its inaugural season in 2019-2020.

“This will be our 44th time this year,” announces Sam, who wears the No. 18 sweater for the Hamiota Huskies, before lacing up. “Last week, we had our 100th skate. We had pizza to celebrate.”

As his sons whir around the rink, a hockey dad leans over the boards watching. “Just last year, Matt could barely stand up on skates,” Dave Rawlings says. He glances toward the ice as if to say, “Look at him now.”

A few decades ago, the hockey dad was the hockey son, wearing No. 12 for his hometown team in Hamiota, about three hours west of Winnipeg. In his mid-40s, he now plays in an old-timers league, yet in their own backyard, he and Lora Rawlings get to watch two young Huskies learn the ins and outs of a classic game, in a pastoral setting that’s as beautiful to see as it is to imagine.

The rink was built out of both necessity and availability: the busy young boys needed activities, the handy father and his own father, Eric, needed a project, and the old sheep barn was empty of sheep. What good is an empty barn?

So in the fall of 2019, the Rawlings, who own the local hardware store and who have run similar shops in town and the southwestern Manitoba community of Glenboro since the barn was built, got to work. They cleaned out the less tasteful evidence of the red barn’s past life and prepared it for its next phase, retaining its old-world charm.

The first year, the rink wasn’t quite as spectacular: the ice was crummy and at times too slushy to use. But what rookie season is without its growing pains?

By the time the sophomore year came, the Rawlings rink crew had made some major improvements: the loft floor above the ice, where Eric had bumped his head, was removed. The roof was reinforced. A sound system was installed. The ice-resurfacing machine — a repurposed Rubbermaid cooler — was doing its job. And around the ice, the boards were decorated with a tribute to the family’s past and present.

Using a digital projector, Dave Rawlings tried his hand at commercial art.

Onto the boards, he traced and painted the logos for four generations of Rawlings family business: the furniture company, the Home Hardware shop they run in town, and defunct family businesses, such as Allied Hardware and the Sunset Store, which Eric’s father ran in Glenboro in the 1930s.

The rink’s third season began with a skate on Nov. 28, 2021, and the Rawlings family excitedly hurried outside several times a week to take advantage of their home ice. Having the rink, or the Coliseum, as one friend calls it, keeps the family entertained and busy, says Lora Rawlings, who doesn’t skate as much as her husband and sons.

They usually skate for a little while after supper, and on weekend days and nights. But a few months into the season, the Rawlings had more time to skate than ever before.

“(In January,) I got COVID and Matt had to isolate (because he was a close contact),” says Sam, who like his five-year-old brother has had both doses of the vaccine. “Daddy had it too.”

For Dave and Lora, it meant staying home from work. For Sam, it meant missing 10 days of school. For Matt, who was already isolating because of a close contact at daycare, the family’s run-in with the virus meant staying home for a total of 22 days. Symptom-free, the boys still had energy and spent it on the ice.

“We pretty much skated every day,” Sam says. They even ate dinner in the dressing room.

The boys’ hockey seasons with the Huskies — for Sam, a B Side championship year, for Matt, his first campaign of organized hockey — are finished. But a cold winter meant that by the middle of March, the ice was still in fine form for the 44th skate of the season, the temperature hovering around zero.

With Stompin’ Tom Connors blaring from the speakers, the Rawlings brothers storm the crease like bumblebees before the final flick of a hockey stick and the one gigantic scream: “The puck is in. The home team wins!”

You know the rest.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com

Ben Waldman
Reporter

Ben Waldman covers a little bit of everything for the Free Press.

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