How this works

The Ice Transparency Project lets parents across any minor hockey association in the Capital Regional District anonymously report individual practice ice times, one at a time, with no accounts and no file uploads. The goal is to compare fairness of practice ice access across associations: time of day, day of week, travel distance, and how associations treat competitive (rep) teams versus recreational (house) teams.

This isn't just a local concern. A 2026 national pilot report from the Future of Hockey Lab's Open Ice platform, studying ice bookings across Nova Scotia, found that female hockey participants travel about 15% farther on average than male participants to reach their rink, and that most ice booking data isn't tracked by gender or age at all, making it hard for anyone to tell whether ice is being allocated fairly.

This project applies that same idea, making ice allocation visible, at a small, grassroots scale, specifically for minor hockey in the Capital Regional District. It isn't affiliated with Open Ice, Hockey Canada, or Bauer. It's built on the same premise: you can't fix what you can't see. Read more about the program this idea comes from at the Future of Hockey Lab, or see the further reading page for more on this topic.

Beyond what parents report here, four of the six associations tracked on this site already publish their own ice schedule publicly, some for the whole season at once, others as it progresses. We link directly to each one on the home page. Capital Region Female Minor Hockey Association and Peninsula Minor Hockey Association do not currently publish a public schedule.

Anyone can submit a report through the report form. If someone else has already reported the exact same practice (same team, rink, date, and start time), your report is linked to theirs instead of creating a duplicate. That's why some practices show more than one report. Every other metric on the dashboard counts each real practice once, no matter how many people reported it, except for average travel distance.

Getting more than one report for the same practice is genuinely useful, not redundant. Each report can include a different family's home area, so extra reports build a fuller, more accurate picture of how far people actually travel to reach that practice. Report a practice even if you think someone else already has.

Hard time slot

A practice that starts before 7:00 AM, on a weekday between 3:00 PM and 5:00 PM (school pickup and rush-hour traffic), or at 9:00 PM or later on a weekday other than Friday (a late bedtime on a school night). Only the start time matters here, not how long the practice runs, since this is about how hard it is to get there on time, not how long you're there. Early mornings count as hard on weekends too, since kids don't want a 6 AM practice any more on a Saturday than on a school day.

Prime time

Simply everything that isn't a hard time slot. It's the positive mirror image, showing who's getting the good weekday-evening and weekend slots.

Rep vs. house comparisons

Every rep-vs-house number (duration, travel distance, ice type, and so on) only includes age groups where that association has reports for both a rep team and a house team. A young age group that's house-only (like U7 at some associations) would otherwise skew the comparison for reasons that have nothing to do with how rep and house are actually treated.

Full vs. shared ice

What share of practices get a full sheet rather than half or cross ice. This one counts U11 and up only. At U9 and under, shared ice is the standard playing format, so including those ages wouldn't say anything about how an association allocates ice, it would only reflect how many of its youngest teams happen to have been reported. In the data so far, U9 and under run under 2% full ice at every association, while U11 and up run 50% or more.

Average travel distance

Straight-line ("as the crow flies") distance between the rink and whatever home area a reporting family chose. Not a driving distance, so it understates anywhere a direct route isn't available. Only counted for reports that included a home area, since that field is optional.

Schedule consistency

The average number of different rinks, and different weekdays, a single team's reported practices are spread across. Lower means more predictable, with the same rink and the same day every week.

Every report is self-submitted and anonymous. There's no verification that a report is accurate, and no way to confirm who submitted it. Associations or teams with only a handful of reports will have much less reliable averages than ones with many; the dashboard calls this out directly wherever it applies. Reports can be flagged and hidden if they turn out to be wrong or spam, but that moderation happens after the fact, not before a report appears.

Everything reported here is free for anyone to download and reuse: parents, associations, journalists, municipalities, researchers, anyone at all. A project about making ice allocation visible would be a strange place to lock the data up.

That's what the Download CSV button on the explore page is for. It hands you the same data the dashboard is built from, matching whatever filters you currently have set, with no account and no permission needed. Attribution is appreciated but not required. The file itself notes where it came from, along with the reminder that reports are self-submitted and should be treated as approximate.

This project is young, and it's meant to keep growing. Data accuracy will improve as more parents report practices and more official schedules get added. The dashboard's metrics, and how they're presented, will keep evolving too, as it becomes clearer what's actually useful to parents and what isn't. If something looks thin or rough today, that's expected at this stage, not a sign it's finished.

No accounts, no names, no email addresses are collected anywhere on this site. The optional home area field is used only to calculate travel distance in aggregate. It's never shown alongside any individual report.