Cornell has systematically made Lynah Rink inaccessible to most of its students.
Cornell’s hockey culture was officially born in 1901, though undoubtedly skaters braved Beebe Lake earlier than that. The first rink was built on Beebe Lake in 1907, when Cornell began hosting home games. In 1928, Cornell introduced official intramurals. Skating and hockey on the lake served as some of Cornell’s most popular wintertime activities until 1957, when they were moved into the newly built Lynah Rink.
Unfortunately, Cornell has made Lynah less available to students, despite pouring $7.3 million into the facility during its 2006 renovation. Students can still register for hockey and skating classes to meet their Physical Education requirements, but, since 2009, Cornell offers no outlets for students to play once they’ve completed the course. The only other option to play hockey at Cornell is with the club teams, which are just a little less selective than the varsity teams.
Besides cutting intramural hockey, Cornell has reduced the hours that Lynah Rink can be rented and made it extremely difficult for students to attend public skates. As it stands, most weeks have no more than 4 hours dedicated to public skating. Many weeks have less, and the time is always the same: midday on weekdays. For a Cornell student enrolled in regular classes, there is no worse time because of classes. Efforts to change these times–including a petition signed by more than 300 Cornellian and Cornell affiliates–have been met with excuses of limited staff and ice time.
In an October interview with the Cornell Daily Sun, Deputy Director of Athletics Anita Brenner suggested a time might be added on Sundays. However, following the petition and interview, skating times were reduced, and no Sunday skating time materialized until the beginning of the spring semester. Today’s public skate marks the first Sunday public skating time slot since before the COVID-19 shutdown, and comes nearly 3 months after it was promised.
Today’s public skate marks the first Sunday public skating time slot since before the COVID-19 shutdown, and comes nearly 3 months after it was promised.
To make matters worse, there is almost no effort to disseminate rink availability to students at all. Lynah’s website (link here) appears to be inactive, though Cornell’s other websites still link to it. To find any listed skating times at all, students must navigate to a Facebook page where Rink Manager Philip Graham has been posting skating times since 2018. Has Lynah’s website been defunct for five years without anyone bothering to fix it? One can be forgiven for believing that Cornell no longer considers Lynah as a resource for all its students.
Has Lynah’s website been defunct for five years without anyone bothering to fix it?
Cornell seems to have lost its impetus to support its hockey tradition. Intramural participants once formed the backbone of Cornell’s famous hockey fanbase. Cornell Hockey has seen reduced attendance since 2012, when the last class to have experienced intramural hockey graduated. While many forces could explain the overall drop of the Lynah crowd, (including Cornell’s performance, economic trends, timing of games, etc.) declining student involvement in hockey-related activities certainly isn’t helping.
In interviews, Cornell athletic officials have cited nearly every imaginable reason as obstacles to intramural hockey’s return, including unfamiliarity with the rules, expensive officials, staffing issues, safety concerns and promotion struggles. Yet unaddressed is the fact that Cornell was able to host intramural hockey for decades, and that other schools with less money and fewer students continue to operate broadly successful intramural hockey programs.
As I demonstrated in an extensive report on intramural hockey, Cornell is more than capable of hosting a state of the art intramural hockey league, and once had several. The popular sport was nixed in 2009 because of budget changes and because it was a headache for administrators, according to Intramural Director Scott Flickinger. It seems Cornell originally planned to bring hockey back after a year or two, but they never did.
Hockey and skating are fundamental to Cornell. They were a part of this school before it had Lynah Rink, and before many students’ grandparents were born. Now, apart from a few entry-level skating classes and the exceedingly ill-timed public skating hours, the average Cornellian has no access to the ice.
Cornell has given Lynah rink over to the handful of Cornellians that constitute Cornell’s athletic teams; the rest are only fit to be in the crowds. What was once the pastime of many Cornellians is now reserved for the few. Cornell is killing its hockey culture, and nobody seems to know why.
