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Art on the ice

Arena and park staff join volunteers to get ice ready for hockey season

Marshall High School art teacher Brydie DeMuth paints a logo on the Red Baron and Expo ice Thursday morning.

MARSHALL — Marshall High School art teacher Brydie DeMuth looked over at the painted ice inside the Red Baron Arena Thursday morning before walking toward the paint brush that was waiting for her in the middle of the hockey rink.

“Pretty awesome,” she said.

DeMuth, who is also a hockey mom, was volunteering her time to help prepare the ice on the main rink for the upcoming hockey season. Her job was to paint the logos. She set out to finish one of the large logos.

“We like to put an art teacher on that because it’s tricky,” Cody Mellenthin said. He is the maintenance supervisor at the Red Baron Arena and Expo Facility. “You can see we lay the stencils out that gives us guidelines, but you still have to do a little freehand.”

DeMuth said she enjoys the volunteer work on the ice. It also gives her a chance during the hockey season to admire her work while watching the games.

“It’s not hard, but it’s a lot of fun,” she said. “It’s very different from anything else I ever done.”

DeMuth is one of several volunteers, city park staff and arena personnel working this week to get the ice and facilities ready.

“There’s prep work with the boards and the glass going up that takes about a day,” Mellenthin said. “There’s a little bit of ice and then we paint on top of that. Paint all the white, then we put a little more ice down, then we paint all the logos and lines. We measure everything out, paint that up. Then we put about an inch of ice on top of that, which is a long process also because we have to go with real thin layers. The thinner, the harder, the better the ice.”

Mellenthin has had a lot of practice putting down ice and maintaining it since being in charge of the old Marshall hockey rink before the Red Baron was built. He said he had to learn a few new techniques when he took over the maintenance in the new facility.

“There are a lot of new things thrown into the mix — new systems. It’s going good. This is our third season putting this ice in. We just took that ice over there (pointing to practice rink) out and put it back in about a month ago. We wanted to do some maintenance and clean it up, repaint it and refreshing,” he said.

Mellenthin said while the ice remains on the practice rink year round, the ice on the main rink stays in about five or six months. The remaining months are dedicated to non-hockey events such as expos.

He said the ice is maintained daily during the hockey season.

“We will have at least eight hours a day in an ice activity on a given week day. Depending on the level — if it’s little kids they don’t beat it up so bad, but if it’s high school kids, they beat the tar out of it. So at least once a week I’ll go and shave a bunch of ice off to get it perfectly level and perfectly smooth and then build it back up with water again.”

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