It was cloudy and relatively warm on Friday, 50 degrees to be exact, which, when it came to skating, was fine with him, Doug De Groot said, the Buckskill Winter Club’s enemy this time of year being the sun.
As kids on skates clomped around on rubber mats and parents sat on couches around a fireplace above whose mantel a television was showing pro hockey highlights, Buckskill’s owner said that he and his wife, Kathryn, converted their tennis club into a skating one for three and a half months a year in 2005.
“We’d come over here with the kids after church on Sundays and the clubhouse would be empty and the courts winterized and we’d wonder what we could do here in the winter that would work. so that we could have a viable year-round business.”
And so the Buckskill Winter Club with its 85-by-200-foot regulation National Hockey League-size rink, on which many East Enders, including some of the club’s present day instructors, have learned to skate, was born.
“We’ve been open for three weeks now. It’s always a struggle, you know, especially this year with the warm weather and a lot of rain. Because of that, we weren’t able to open by Thanksgiving, as we like to do. It took us two extra weeks to open this year, but now that we are everyone’s happy. All of our programs, from ‘learn to skate’ to our adult hockey league, are running.”
Brittni Svanberg, who, with Emma Dahl, oversees Buckskill’s U.S. Figure Skating Association classes, and who skated with Boston University’s team, learned to skate at Buckskill, as did Frank LoPinto, a grad school student who’s one of the hockey coaches. Indeed, said De Groot, there are a number of Buckskill alumni playing now with UpIsland hockey teams.
“The sport’s booming on Long Island, but there’s a dearth of ice time up west, so we’re trying to get those teams to come out here for Winter Classic-type games out in the fresh air as nature intended,” said De Groot. “We’re hoping to schedule 10 games, with teams as near as Southampton and as far west as Islip. The first one tentatively will be with Southampton on Jan. 5, a Sunday, tentatively at 8:45 in the morning.”
Tim Luzadre, who has been with the winter club since it began, oversees the hockey program, along with Cory Lillie, formerly Buckskill’s manager, Danny Roman, Ian Evans, and LoPinto. “Cory’s in business with his dad now, though he’s still helping with the juniors and, with Tim, coaching our high school-age hockey team, which practices three times a week for an hour and a half. We also have adult hockey, an adult league on Tuesday and Thursday nights, and drop-in hockey games Sunday mornings.”
“Years ago,” he continued, “we offered some beginner speed skating classes, and we’re going to do that again too. We have a coach, Jaime Ruiz, a native of Chile who lives in Hampton Bays and is an accomplished amateur in his age group. He’ll come out twice a week to give clinics.”
As that day’s crowd attested, open skating too, was “extremely popular,” De Groot said, as were the club’s Friday “teen nights,” and its rink rentals for nighttime parties.
When it came to skating, he said in parting, “we’re the incubator, the field of dreams.”