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.

Beyond what parents report here, five 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 does 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 starting before 7:00 AM, or on a weekday between 3:00 PM and 5:00 PM (school pickup and rush-hour traffic). 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.

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.

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.