Famed Broadcaster Dale Arnold Visits Six Rivers Youth Sports to Help Raise The Rink!

Benet Pols January 5, 2024

Dale Arnold, with a timbre and face familiar to legions of New England Sports fans as the voice of, among others, the Boston Bruins and the New England Patriots, paid a visit to the Six Rivers Youth Sports Complex in Topsham and met with board president Bill Patterson and his team to review the plans for the new ice arena, hear about fundraising, tour the existing indoor turf facility, and to lend his support.

For many in attendance Dale’s tones and presence go back to his days on WBOR broadcasting Bowdoin College Hockey during the Polar Bears’ legendary Championship runs under iconic Coach Sid Watson or, even further, to the sidelines of the gridiron on McKeen Street in Brunswick where Dale cut his teeth as a teen doing play-by-play for Dragon football at WCME.

Dale’s embrace of Six Rivers Youth Sports’ mission was palpable the moment he mentioned his daughter’s hockey career. Dale noted that while he had lettered in four sports in high school he never played hockey himself but did become that most dutiful and passionate of all sports parents—a Hockey Dad. Dale has shivered by the glass in the early morning hours, been to rinks in the remotest corners of New England and the Maritimes, and spent nights in threadbare motels as knee hockey games raged in the corridors until all hours.

Dale knows the importance of local, public ice. Dale knows the importance of youth sports. And Dale knows the importance of inclusive opportunities.

With board members spanning the generations, reminisces flew. Doug Morrell, Brunswick High ’69 skated on the first artificial ice in the region when Bowdoin’s storied Dayton Area opened in 1956. He and Tim Griffing ’74 played in the era when Maine had just five high school hockey teams. Sid Pols, BHS ’23, the event videographer, told of winning a State Championship with the Dragons in 2022 and recounted Brunswick’s epic five overtime playoff win over the Cheverus/Yarmouth co-op that season.

Chelsea Bickford, Six RIvers’ project manager, is a second generation ice warrior with dual interests. In the late 70s when Maine High School Boys hockey expanded from five to eight teams her father hit the ice with the first Mt. Ararat varsity squad. Chelsea laced them up herself in high school using the skills she learned at the Skating Club of Brunswick to patrol the blue line for the Yarmouth Clippers Womens’ hockey team. But as a veteran figure skater and teacher whose mother led the Brunswick Skating Club for years, what she really misses is the Gala Shows every March.

Like a local Ice Capades these shows had it all and signaled the final event on Bowdoin’s ice every spring; there were sequins, costumes, skits, line routines but also real opportunities for local figure skaters to perform at a high level in spot lit glory for an adoring audience..

Everyone had a coldest rink story.

Everyone had a story about getting on the ice before school at 4:30 AM.

Everyone agreed that the region needs another indoor ice skating facility and that efforts like the Zamboni Pull fundraiser are vital to raise the rink..

The Zamboni Pull

Brunswick’s Hockey Moms, tired of driving all winter for practices, came equipped with work gloves to give the Zamboni a pull for their teams. The course had gotten smooth and fast by the end of the afternoon but the hockey Moms pulled first. Even with a Zamboni full of water and the course frozen and bumpy, the Moms got it done.

Sixteen teams braved classic stick season raw weather to lend helping hands to haul a seven ton Zamboni the length of a forty foot course adjacent to Six Rivers Youth Sports indoor turf field just off Route 201 in Topsham.

Their cause? Raise $400,000 before the end of the year to unlock a $400,000 matching grant so Six Rivers Youth Sports can move forward with plans to add an indoor, fully refrigerated, NHL sized ice arena to the lot. Familiar to many as the former sites of Roller World and “The Dome,” Six Rivers recently doubled the acreage available for the project. As the location has been a destination for generations of young people, the spot is a cinch as the best place to add a new ice sheet to the local inventory.

The Bowdoin Men’s Ice Hockey team, whose home ice, the Sidney J. Watson Arena, is the only other local sheet, stepped up to put several teams into the Zamboni Pulling contest but plenty of other luminaries put teams in as well. Like most good fundraisers, this was as much about Fun as Funds. Costumes and team apparel was de rigueur. “It was gratifying to all the volunteers at Six Rivers Youth Sports to see so many people turn out and pull together with excitement for the new rink,” said Bill Patterson, the longtime President of the non-profit’s board.

Being first on the course hampered the Brunswick Hockey Moms. The Moms were hamstrung by the fact that the Zamboni’s snow tank was still filled to the brim with water. Sloshing over many heats lightened its load so the boys from Bowdoin had it easy by their turn on the course. But hard work didn’t challenge these women; they’ve been putting in the miles for their skaters for years.

**Nothing shows *esprit de corps* like Jorts. Izzy’s Fan Club got it done in the costume department.**

Why does the region need a new ice arena? After-all Bowdoin’s state of the art Watson Arena is home to Brunswick 2022 State Champion Boys Hockey team, the State’s only public school with a stand alone girls team in the Brunswick Dragons, two teams from Mt. Ararat, and legions of youth hockey players and figure skaters throughout the community.

That is just the point. Things have changed since Bowdoin built its first indoor rink in 1956. The demands on ice time at the college have changed with the growth of women’s hockey at all levels and increased regionalization of high school sports.. The four high school teams from Mt. Ararat and Brunswick now represent six or eight different schools from Lisbon to Wiscasset, across to Freeport, and every town in between.

The twin sheets of Auburn’s Norway Savings Bank Arena have long been a second home for the area’s youth skaters but consider the 11 year-old skater sitting in a car with her parents, driving from somewhere on Orr’s Island to Auburn for hockey practice on a weekday night. She’s eating dinner on the fly in the car, and hitting the ice at 7 PM. After an hour of drills she will be lucky to be home for bed at 9 p.m. Meanwhile her mom is watching the snow falling, wondering what Rte. 196 will look like on the way home.

Led by Coach Ben Guite atop the Zamboni, the Bowdoin Men’s Ice Hockey team put several teams in the Zambini pull contest braving sleet and occasional snow to help raise some funds and awareness. The college has always been generous with the ice time but their first priority is their own students so there is simply not enough local ice available to fill the local demand..

It’s not just about youth youth hockey or high school hockey. The new rink will provide recreation for the area’s adult leagues, figure skaters, curling leagues, and recreational skaters. Even now, the turf field is an asset to the community providing off season indoor practice facilities for the local field hockey, lacrosse, and soccer players.

The Skating Club of Brunswick, for the time being constrained to giving lessons at one end of the ice while their recreational skating occupies the remainder of the sheet, will once again have the time and space to pull off its annual show and provide more competitive outlets for its talented skaters.

A 2016 estimate by Midcoast Youth Hockey found that a child spends a minimum of 66 hours in the car over the course of a season, to get 44 hours of practice time. Even carpooling with three players a car, the Midcoast Youth Hockey Association was driving roughly 62,000 miles a year to make sure its skaters got their ice time. No doubt the same is true for the region’s figure skaters.

So the Moms know driving and they know Zambonis. They also know a good time. While they came out clad in hockey jerseys representing the local squads, plenty of the other teams put on their best threads to celebrate the occasion. The unofficial best costume contest was a toss-up. On the one hand was Izzy’s Fab Club with their ugly seasonal sweaters and classic denim jorts. On the other was the Morning Wake-Up Hockey Club complete with Stove Pipe hats and a human sized rabbit mascot.

Pizzas, beer, and treats were provided by The Osprey, Moderation Brewing, and The Pejepscot.

All together this event raised $10,950 which together with the December match totals out to just shy of $22,000.

The existing indoor turf facility and fitness facility is at left in what was once the Roller World facility on Atwood Lane just off Route 201 in Topsham. Pictured at right is the proposed new indoor, fully refrigerated, NHL sized arena. ***Visit Six Rivers Youth Sports***

The Back-Checker

Benet Pols December 31, 2021

The back-checker.

Look at the background and edges of your photographs.

A third look at this set of photographs after publishing them in a game album last week revealed a second layer of detail: one of those little bits of dutiful hard work and attention to detail that define teamwork, the back-check. My theme had been the eyes of the defenseman as he worked to contain the puck carrier at the corner; it seemed like a candidate for Faces of Brunswick.

While manipulating this first photo looking for a better, more intent, perspective on the eyes I cropped the outstretched stick and the extended knee of the back-checking forward. At the crucial moment he had closed the passing lane and shut down a two-on-one through the slot freeing the defenseman to contain the puck carrier.

It didn’t seem like an important detail until it was gone. I wondered what the back-checker had done next. Over the next few frames I watched him curl from the passing lane to the front of net to cover the open man, give a quick look to the neutral zone to see who else is coming, and allow the rest of the defense to recover. A text book back-check. It doesn’t make the score sheet. Maybe no one even notices it at the time.

Thank your back-checkers and fore-checkers and always look at the edges of your photos.

Pull Up In Black And Orange And Get Rowdy

Benet Pols December 13, 2021

Pull up in Black and Orange and get rowdy.

Nearly seven years have drifted by between the photo on the left and the photo on the right. I made the earlier photo while in the bench at the behest of our youth hockey association to help create promotional materials to kick start a local rink building project. The second photo was made while waiting to get an image of the pregame team huddle for the high school hockey team, evidently a crucial component of the student fan section’s instagram account, @wick.fans.

The same two people are featured. The coach’s gesture in the recent photo reminded me of a slightly different version of the older photo; his posture was the same with his hands splayed to indicate space and movement. But that photo is lost somewhere in the digital bowels of another Mac sitting nearby. I spent an hour or so mining for it this morning before conceding that the similar version, which had made the migration over to the current Mac, would have to do.

I like them because of their similarities. The same faces are featured, but this known only to those familiar with the coach. In the older photo depth of field obscures exactly who he is, you have to know to know. Likewise the crop of the newer photo portrays as him a bit of a secondary character. The hand, without more, tells us that the lesson is underway. The player is attentive in both photos, but his eyes are on the ice visualizing the message. Seven years.

Remember. Pull up in Black and Orange and get rowdy. Boys home opener Tuesday, 6:30, Girls Wednesday, 8:45. Both at Watson.

1344 Pounds of Granite

Benet Pols February 22, 2019

Bill Patterson tested the limits of a borrowed pick-up truck by loading it with thirty-two curling stones and driving them from Sudbury, Massachusetts to The Rink at Brunswick Landing for a series of curling demonstrations. The stones, each weighing about forty-two pounds, belong to a curling club in Massachusetts. The club loans the set, and associated gear, to groups looking to start local curling facilities.

Located just behind Flight Deck Brewing off of Admiral Fitch Avenue on Brunswick Landing, the rink hosted its first curling demonstrations on pair of beautiful February weekends. Sometimes compared to shuffleboard on ice, curling is extremely popular in Canada, and in colder European countries, but is familiar to most Americans only as a curiosity during the winter Olympics. The antic sweeping, the audible strategic discussions and interplay between the players, and the fact that the stones actually slow down as they move into scoring position gives the sport a kind of conversational sociability that is drawing people in.

Under crystal blue skies with temperatures in the upper 20s curling enthusiasts, novices, and passersby joined in for long afternoons of curling in the lengthening winter days. Patterson was gratified by the strong response, “There were many people, from retirees to recent college grads, that wanted to participate in this highly social winter sport. With youth hockey our focus has always been on the school age population, but this really opens things up. Plus the rink is highly visible and near to the amenities at Brunswick Landing. With Flight Deck Brewing, the Cooks Takes Flight food truck, and the fire pit nearby people were destined to have a good time. The consensus seemed to be that while curling is very tough to master it’s also a very friendly sport and easy for the beginner to pick-up and enjoy.”

Patterson spearheads Midcoast Youth Hockey’s effort to build an enclosed, refrigerated rink at Brunswick Landing to support local skating, youth hockey, and to provide practice space for the high school teams at Brunswick and Mt. Ararat high school. “Bowdoin has always been very good to us but local teams have to compete for ice at Bowdoin’s Watson Arena with the college’s own programming, which happens to include a curling club. I started to think about adding a curling venue to our project when I learned that the Bowdoin kids travel to Belfast at least once a week to use an enclosed dedicated curling facility.”

Curling requires a different ice surface than the smooth surface needed for hockey and figure skating. A pebbled ice surface created by specialized equipment is necessary. Belfast has the closest real curling facility. Under ideal travel conditions Belfast is still a ninety-minute drive from Brunswick. Patterson reached out to local curling enthusiasts through the Bowdoin club and built a network including the Bowdoin College Club, The Pine Tree Curling Club of Portland, and the Belfast Curling Club. This allowed Midcoast to track down the stones and equipment and to bring in some talent to guide the events. “We’d really like to build on the enthusiasm we saw these last weekends. We’ve been working on the idea of a rink for Brunswick for many years and it’s great to be able to expand what we can offer.”

Check the rink calendar for the Brunswick Landing Arena for future events, and the photo gallery to see all the fun.

Learning a New Sport, Part II: At least there is no offsides.

Benet Pols September 26, 2018

My most attentive readers will recall my view that the rules of field hockey can make following the flow of the game difficult for new fans, and present some challenges for the photographer. In the last three weeks, I have had plenty of opportunity to see a lot more field hockey, to ask some questions, and to do some reading. But the best thing I learned came in a flash, an epiphany.

There is no offside in field hockey.

Offsides seems simple enough, especially in ice hockey where a big, foot-wide, blue line painted on the white ice should help. But I know one hockey player who spent three years offsides, his inability to remember the blue line eclipsed only by his willingness to blame the kid carrying the puck for the whistle. I’ve heard soccer coaches—paid coaches on travel teams—berating sixteen year old linesmen because the coach plainly doesn’t understand when a player in a potential offside position should result in a whistle.

So kudos to field hockey: no offsides.

But it is still difficult to photograph. The length of the stick and the requirement that players only play the ball with the flat side (forehand) of the stick lead to some interesting contortions. And a lot of photos of back-sides.

And it never helps when you’re looking through the viewfinder and trying to cheer your team on at the same time. Shooting any sport is easier when the scoring, or who scores doesn’t matter. So this series from a game between Bowdoin College and USM last weekend allowed me to capture the full range of movement required for a player with the ball on her back-hand side to get a shot on goal without sacrificing the time to get in position for a forehand shot.

Time is important because the shot is coming off a penalty corner. You can tell by the crazy Hannibal Lecter mask the USM players are wearing, they only don these during penalty corners because of the heightened possibility of a ball or stick to the face. For a brief time USM will have just four defenders in the shooting area while Bowdoin may have as many as eight offensive players looking for a shot from a set play and as many rebounds as they can hammer on the net before the remaining six defensive players can run back into the action from midfield.

Trying to turn to her forehand will not only kill time, it will also allow the defender—shielded from the ball in the shot here—to take a better defensive position. The shooter is bent more than 90º at the waist with her stick parallel to the ground and almost level with the playing surface. While bending like this she has to retain her balance in order to apply some power to the shot.

And the shot. In the first photo the shooter’s wrists are crossed so that she can get the flat side of the stick to the ball, and take the only legal shot available. A disproportionate amount of the power of this shot will be generated by the shooters arms and wrists as she snaps the stick back into the forehand positions. She knows where the goal is— somewhere over her right shoould—but obviously couldn’t pick a corner.

And the third shot—it’s just a joyous the celebration.

On The Road From Belfast: A Conversion Story

Benet Pols August 21, 2018

A row of fifty heads line the clean horizontal at the crest of a hill. The line of the hill runs from one edge of the frame to the other, the line of heads runs nearly as far.

We are in Maine, in Waldo County. Is this the opening of a tale by Stephen King?

In the next frame the heads are followed by torsos in numbered singlets. In a moment, flowing like water, 250 bodies pour down the hill moving as if connected to one another like parts of a single being, hammering the earth, leaving dust and bits of vegetation fluttering in its wake. It is a cross country race at one of the busiest, and camera friendly, courses in Maine.

Every year a middle school in Belfast hosts some of the biggest races in the state, and New England.

If it is the New England Championship toward the middle of frosty November, the runners, the best of the best, will start with hats, gloves, and long sleeves under team colors. The morning run-through is lit by that certain slant of light; shadows of near leafless trees mark a stark contrast on the rimy grass and highlight the streaks of slowly rising mist. As the light works its way down the trees leaves drop one-by-one. The icy crystals that were the last thing holding them dissolve in the light.

But it could be the State Championship a week earlier or, as every fall, the Northern Maine Regional Cross Country Championships. By regionals the teams have already been pared to their seven fastest runners. The first seven ran together on another course at the prior week’s conference championships. They’re all looking to qualify for the state meet the following weekend. Maybe in Belfast again, or maybe down in Cumberland. Either way, just half the teams will move on so they’re all looking for that one more chance to race.

Or it could be the most transformative of all the races, the Festival of Champions.

On the first Saturday in October, with Indian Summer still blazing away, as many as 1700 high school runners from far and wide show up to run. Sixty-five eager teams from Maine and fifteen or twenty of the elite programs from around New England and the Maritime provinces make the trek to Belfast to show their prowess. Many have come every year since the race first started seventeen years ago.

At Regionals and States, champions are crowned. But at the Festival of Champions, champions are born. Runners are born. Fans are born.

My daughter’s sophomore year, her first running cross-country, marked my first time at Festival. Still not completely over the fact that she had given up soccer, my exploration of the cross country world had been a bit…dutiful.

Sure. I was pleased that she had been scoring for her team, placing in all the regular season meets and sometimes grabbing the third spot behind the two outstanding runners who would lead her team to the Northern Maine Championship a month later. But I had yet to shake the feeling that track and cross country were things athletes did to fill in between seasons. I was fine when she gave up softball for outdoor track her freshman year. Winter track season had been a great addition in high school. She had received accolades, qualified for states and, by spring, even took a podium spot at States.

But I had never been a ballplayer. I had played soccer. And she was a strong, spirited, tough, competitor on the pitch. I was wistful. I missed soccer. I worried that she would end up missing it too.

The structure of the Fesitval provides six or seven competitive races. There are “seeded” races for boys and girls that feature some remarkable athletes, but the structure of the meet provides a series of competitive races across all experience ranges. The seeded races of 200 or more for boys and girls end the day, but freshman races and unseeded heats open the day’s running. The largest of the unseeded heats may have 300 or more runners.

For freshman, the boys and girls races provides a “big meet” atmosphere to first years who, to this point, have probably run just in a few smaller meets. It is an opportunity to shine without being plowed under by hundreds of experienced upperclassmen with several championship meets in the books. As many as fifteen schools field squads large enough to run five or more freshman. So the individual competition is strong but the team competition is also bigger than anything the freshmen have seen. More than two hundred boys and girls will run in each of the freshman races. There is no mistaking the big race feel.

What do the unseeded heats mean? For many it just means the runners are slower, less experienced, or new to the sport. But it can also mean you come from a small school and haven’t had enough meets to generate a seed time. Perhaps you’re coming back from an injury. Maybe you just don't have a 5K time yet this season.

Fast performers emerge from the unseeded heats and from the freshman races. Many will displace runners in the seeded heat when scores are reordered to tabulate the overall results.

The elite runners will stagger spectators with their strength, determination, talent, and self-discipline. In 2015 the girls team from La Salle Academy in Providence Rhode Island dropped in. They took four of the first five spots and their fifth scorer finished 18th, ahead of 204 other girls in the seeded race. The 204 she beat had already been separated from another 400 or so by the seeding process. But the manner in which they took the race inspired awe: all finished in less than twenty minutes moving with grace and the unrelenting rigor of a metronome. It looked easy.

But there was plenty of room for home-grown talent too. Orono’s Tia Tardy pierced the bright red wall of La Salle jerseys to take the fourth spot overall. And on the boys side the top two were Lewiston’s own Osman Doorow and Paul Casavant of Hampden, two runners that had run neck and neck in dozens of races..

Unexpected pleasures seep out of the unseeded races too. In 2017 Gaelen Boyle-WIght ran a 17:39 to win the faster of the two unseeded races. One of just three boys from Telstar scattered among the seven races that day it was his one opportunity for a championship that season. He made the most of his chance tearing 35 seconds off his prior best time. Likewise first year Olivia Tiner of Winslow made a splashy debut at the 2017 FOC by taking two-plus minutes off her prior best 5K time and crossing as the third fastest Mainer in the freshman race. Around the scorers table folks were sifting the date bases to learn a little more about the freshman.

The real star, though, is the course itself. With a deserved reputation as a fast course, no one should mistake it for easy. There are plenty of hills, some abrupt and jarring, others on narrow hair-pins, and its reputation for speed adds another layer of pressure. The course’s visual appeal and view sheds make it one of the best courses to watch a race. With a little hustle, fans can easily catch rope-line views of the lead pack six or seven times. The gently rolling hills offer prospects for several other long views. With a lengthy start and run-out to the finish along with the “superhighway” midway through the course, runners can feed on the energy of the throng.

Between Festival and championship season the colors on the course flourish as greens give way to autumn. Only the start of the race is on a groomed playing field and just a brief stretch skirts the edge of a middle school parking area; the impression is rural country-side rather than sculpted park land.

Most of the course is under the dome of the sky ringed by woodland and meadows. It’s no wonder that teams as far flung as the Colonel Gray High School in Price Edward Island, or Harwood Union from Vermont come year after year. With more than forty boys and girls entered in the race Harwood can easily be mistaken for the home team. Thirteen teams from Maine, and one from Cumberland Rhode Island, have never missed a Festival of Champions in all its seventeen years.

On the road home from Belfast that first night I saw that my daughter had taken ownership of something. It was hers, not mine. I am just a convert lucky enough to peak under the dome and stand in awe.

Joy gives way to empathy.

Benet Pols July 13, 2018

What makes a good sports photo? When the ball hits the bat, or the puck stretches the twine amid a froth of sprayed ice, or every tendon wire taut as the footballer stretches to head the ball? Action shots are great, even people who’ve never seen a hockey game know the iconic picture of Bobby Orr soaring across the goal mouth after scoring the overtime winner for the Boston Bruins in the 1970 Stanley Cup finals.

But there are more subtle moments too. The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat offer plenty of opportunities to feature sheer joy, the crushing void of a loss, and the pathos of personal failure.

Track and field offers some unique opportunities. It can take some time for results to be tallied and for marks and times to be posted. The throw was good but just how good? Just you wait right there while the officials measure, confer, and consult. Maybe they measure again.

In a photo finish, you don’t even know who won until the names go up on the board. Just stand in your lane and wait. You’ll find out the same time as the crowd learns. The emotion held back by a chasm just moments long releases and adds layers to the expressions. And the thrill of victory for one always means the agony of defeat for another.

Sometimes the thrill of victory is followed quickly by empathy and kindness. And then you see sportsmanship.

Below you see Emily Labbe of Scarborough High School reacting to the scoreboard showing she had just won the 2018 Maine Class A Championship in the 100 meter hurdles. She’d won by 0.02 seconds and so did not know it until her name flashed up on the board in the first spot. Labbe had bested a three time State Champion in the event who, to that point, was unbeaten in Championship races for her career. It was a huge win. Behind her another runner's fingers are crossed as the board lists the finishers slowly, one-by-one.

Watch as Labbe’s joy is tempered by fellowship for the competition, and then re-ignites.