From concrete to ice, Sanford Center staff readies venue for Bemidji functions

BEMIDJI — After the final goals are scored, the finishing guitar notes are played and the last bronco is bucked off a bull, the Sanford Center operations staff gets to work.

Preparing Bemidji’s state-of-the-art venue takes a lot of manpower. At the head of it is Brian Leduc, a hockey junkie that passionately moved up the ranks in the arena business to assume his role of operations manager at the Sanford Center. The University of Wisconsin-River Falls graduate is heading into his third year at his post.

“I fell in love with playing hockey in my last two years of college,” Leduc said. “I moved back home close to Blaine. I played hockey there, and they needed Zamboni drivers. It was a very entry-level job, but I got a lot of experience. I fell in love with it because I had some really good role models in the industry who have gone on to do some amazing things. They helped me land a job in my hometown in (St. Michael-Albertville).”

Blaine is home to the National Sports Center Super Rink, a 300,000-square-foot facility with eight sheets of ice – four Olympic-sized and four NHL-sized.

“I was involved, but it was in a little more of a lighter role,” Leduc said of his ice management duties in Blaine. “You have to work your way up. If you work at it and learn from it, then you get to move up. At STMA, we had a company out in Wisconsin that would come in and paint the ice. We’d help build the ice, but they’d paint it.”

Leduc’s passion for ice was utilized again on Aug. 22. That’s when the operations staff began watering the concrete slab that centers the Sanford Center. It’s a week-long process that builds the ice for hockey games, most notably for the Bemidji State men’s and women’s teams.

The process starts with cleaning the concrete floor and making sure the refrigeration system under the concrete is in order.

“There’s a bunch of plastic tubes that run water under the floor,” Leduc explained. “We got that dialed in. Our HVAC is dialed in. We took out the humidity and made it cold in the space. It’s about 55 degrees in there right now.”

Leduc’s team uses a contraption called a mister, which lays thin layers of water over the rounded 85-by-200-foot rink. After a small layer of water freezes on the bottom, batches of white liquid, concocted with powder ice paint in a barrel, are sifted through the hose and sprayed on the surface. Once the bevy of white coats is evenly distributed, the crew seals the base layer with more rounds of clear water.

Painting the lines that give hockey players dimensions to play on is more of a meticulous process.

“You have the blue lines, red lines, goal lines,” Leduc said. “Along the boards, we freeze a piece of yarn all the way across. From there, we take a 2-inch brush and get to work. We paint a 2-inch red line for the goal line, a 1-foot line for the blue lines and the red line. And then everything gets sealed, no matter if it’s paint or logos.”

Next, the goal crease is centered and painted, serving as the measurement base for the ensuing faceoff dots brushed along the ice.

“We measure about 22 feet from the center of the goal crease each way and then 22 feet from those edges,” Leduc added. “Then we freeze a string in line with those dots and create more faceoff dots. With the (faceoff) circles, it’s kind of like a protractor. We have a stick that somebody holds (in the middle of the circle). We have a 15-foot steel string attached to it. One person will take a permanent marker and circle around the dot while pulling on that string.”

Leduc tries not to think about his days in geometry class, but painting the ice revives an old-school mathematical approach to a modern process. Once the hand labor is finished, the crew pulls out the vinyl logos and centers them on the ice.

The Bemidji State Beaver mascot fills the center faceoff circle. Sanford Center advertisers paid for the right to display their business on the ice for the year, placing them in the middle of a layered ice sandwich.

“We take a backpack sprayer once they’re flat and soak them until (they’re) damp (on the ice),” Leduc said. “Then you get a squeegee to flatten them out, get the water worked out. You have to do it little by little. Otherwise, if you try to rapidly do it, the logos will freeze up toward the surface and stick out of the ice.”

When it’s all done, dozens of layers make up an inch and an eighth of ice, good enough for the Beavers to play in front of the BSU faithful.

However, when the next headline musical act, rodeo or banquet needs the venue, the ice sheet is buried under a plethora of panels that support the weight of the occasion. Tightly puzzled 4-by-8-foot stacks piece together to buffer people from the cold surface.

Layering is a little more extensive for an event like the rodeo, which is held annually at the Sanford Center at the end of September.

“We’re going to take a polyplastic sheet to put over it and drape it over the boards,” Leduc noted. “Then we have to lay out 4-by-8-foot sheets of plywood to cover it. I’m not sure how long that’s going to take yet because it’ll be my first one, but it’ll be chaos.”

Transforming a concert venue back to a hockey rink is also a careful process. The operations staff removes the covered surfaces off the ice only to find leftover liquid remnants of the concertgoers. After the panels and larger debris are removed, the operations staff scrapes the ice enough to fill the Zamboni box.

“There’s beer under the ice decking, all sorts of contaminants,” Leduc said. “Sometimes it’s just dirt and muck. It can get nasty under there. … When you take it all off the ice, you’ll want to take the (worst) blade you have for your Zamboni and shave three to four boxes on the Zamboni if you have the time. Sometimes, you won’t have the time, so you’ll only get to shave one box off the ice. For the rodeo, we’ll have to shave probably 4-6 boxes if we can.”

The ice gets taken out before the summer. It’s a much less detailed process that takes only a day and includes the use of heavy machinery and plenty of boots on the ground.

“It just depends on the equipment you have, but you turn the ice plant on overnight to soften it,” Leduc explained. “It’ll get really soft, and then you shave it with the Zamboni over and over and over again. Once you get dangerously close to logos and floor, you take a Bobcat out there and bucket the ice out. We’ve had four-wheelers with a plow on it come to help move the melting ice out. The floor gets a little bit messy. That’s when you scrub it.”

On any given day, Leduc oversees up to 20 workers on this operations staff. It’s a crew that works almost exclusively behind the scenes to ensure the next main event at the Sanford Center goes off without a hitch.

“I took this job because I have a passion for ice,” Leduc said. “I’ve learned a lot about arena conversions. There’s a lot of scheduling, but we do anything that can get people through the doors here. It just takes a lot of communication with me and my other departments. … It’s a messy process and is hard work but it’s worth it.”