Twelve leagues, one Zamboni: the schedule that keeps community ice alive
The machine does a hundred and forty flood shifts a winter, towed between rinks on a schedule with its own constitution.
The document that keeps twelve community league rinks open every winter is four pages long, lives in a shared drive, and is referred to by everyone involved as the constitution. It is the flood schedule for one Zamboni, bought jointly in 2016, towed between neighbourhoods behind a 2009 pickup that is also jointly owned and separately argued about.
The machine does about a hundred and forty flood shifts a winter. The constitution allocates them by a formula weighing rink size, boards or no boards, and — the clause that took three years of annual general meetings — whether a league actually staffed its shack the previous season. Ice for the leagues that show up; the leagues that show up, in turn, produce the ice.
The system's founder, who stepped back last year after a decade as scheduler, described the job as "one-third logistics, two-thirds diplomacy, and every January somebody cries." Her successor inherited a laminated map, a group chat with 213 members, and the veto.
This winter's draft schedule posts to the leagues Thursday. Amendments, per the constitution, require a seconder, a two-thirds vote, and — per tradition nobody can date but everybody enforces — a tray of squares brought to the meeting by the league proposing the change.
