2007 Best Backyard Rink Contest Winners

Congratulations to every contestant for sharing with us their backyard rink. Every entry was outstanding and choosing the winners was not an easy task again this year. Click on the thumbnails below to see a full size picture. Once again, our sincere thanks to you all. Jim Stoller, President NiceRink™ Back to Best Backyard Rink Contest Home

Entries

2006-2007 Best Backyard Ice Rink Contest Entries

First Place

Joe Lehrer of Prior Lake,  MN

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This Rink was a Gold Package 45' X 95' Rink using the NiceRink plastic boards and bracket system.

We are Joe (Dad), Mary (Mom), Jake (18), Jerad(17), Mariah (13) and Jesse (10). This is our second year constructing a NiceRink™. This year we built a 45'x 95' NiceRink™ Gold Package at our home in Prior Lake, MN. We modified the rink by adding 4'x 8' pieces of plywood behind the nets and added netting to keep those high shots in play. Our plastic boards with bumper caps and kick plates are awesome we even have round corners this year. The plastic interlocking sideboards with the NiceRink™ brackets go up easy and are great because the puck bounces off of them better than wood ones.
We made our lighting system with gigantic 4 x 6 wood posts delivered on the flatbed from the local lumber yard, a trip to Home Depot for the utility lights and lots of extension cords which you can turn on from inside our house. We dug the post holes with a hand digger. We attached two sets of lights to each post while on the ground and then raised them into their dirt holes. It felt like an Amish barn-raising (I’m guessing).
Next we built a 4'x8' warming house with windows, a bench, and a small electric heater where Mom and friends can watch in comfort and be close to the action.
Dad loves to use his NiceRink™ resurfacer 52" and snow blower to remove the snow. This year we also added some hand-painted lines and face-off circles as well as two full-time NiceRink™ “Rick O'Shay” goalies (“Which are awesome, just as the catalog promised!).
With the mild winter this year, our NiceRink™, is one of the only outdoor rinks in town and we have made the most of it skating every day and night, whenever Dad isn’t flooding or resurfacing it. We have had full squirt and high school teams playing on our rink and lots of little kids and old-timers’ too. To us, our Nice Rink is by far the best! Please send hall of famer’ Bobby Hull over.