By Dylan Lewis, News Staff
They answer to monikers like “Billy Holiday,” “Italian Marble,” “The Rookie,” and “7/10,” and throw around jargon like “double dragon” and “holiday” when discussing their work.
These are the lively men that operate the Zambonis in Matthews Arena.
“I can paint it and maintain it, but don’t ask me to skate on it,” said Bill Smith, Northeastern Athletics facilities supervisor.
Despite operating a Zamboni for 17 years Smith, or “Smitty” as he’s affectionately known by his crew, refuses to skate on the ice. He isn’t alone – on his current team, only three of the drivers played hockey growing up and only two had prior rink experience before joining NU’s Facilities crew.
Mark Bates, who graduated from Northeastern with a bachelor’s degree in communications studies in 2007, is among the few that grew up on ice. As a former DogHouse member, player, captain and coach of NU’s first club ice hockey team, and current driver of Matthews’ Zambonis, Bates has seen every side of rink maintenance.
Bates said a Zamboni’s handling is akin to a ride-on lawnmower and found “gauging when to turn and avoiding the boards” are the two toughest lessons of the learning curve.
He added that it is imperative the operator is always mindful of picking up the machine’s conditioner so the blade doesn’t hit the arena’s concrete when it exits the ice, and to avoid stopping the machine at all costs.
“The water the machine uses is boiling hot, if it sits in the same spot for more than 30 seconds it could melt the 1 ½ inch layer of ice right down to the concrete underneath it,” Bates said.
He worked part-time with the crew as an undergraduate before returning full-time after a brief hiatus from the university to build houses in New Orleans in 2007 and 2008.
Bates said he wasn’t allowed to operate the Zamboni as a student, but once he began working full-time he was trained, and has been driving the machines since the fall of 2008, in which the men’s hockey team went 12-3-4 at home (25-12-4 overall).
In Massachusetts, Zamboni operators need a specific license. It is a wrecking ball of a machine – taller than the average man (5-foot-9) and weighing more than 7,000 pounds.
But surprisingly, with the exception of a few states, rink maintenance is learned on the job through hands-on experience. Smith trained at Matthews when he joined the crew “by going out on the ice with someone who had operated [a Zamboni] for a while and learned from him,” and he’s kept that tradition.
The rink at Matthews arena is resurfaced multiple times daily during hockey season depending on practice times men’s and women’s teams and the free skate schedule, but maintenance doesn’t stop there. Usually once a day, sometimes twice, Bates will scrape the edges where the ice meets the boards to maintain a straight corner and prevent a lip from forming.
When they aren’t making their intermission trips around the rink, you can find the Zamboni crew passing the time on game days watching from behind the nets as the ice they smooth gets carved by skaters.
Smith, Bates and the rest of the crew said they love their jobs, but there is a downside. The machines generate a deafening noise, but not quite loud enough to drain out certain arena anthems.
“That Black Eyed Peas song, ‘Tonight’s going to be a good night,’ [‘I Gotta Feeling’] yeah, I’m kind of sick of that one,” Bates said.
The ice has been melted down at Matthews for the season, changing the crews’ focus to Friedman Diamond and the baseball team’s needs.
