For a midday practice for the Baltimore Banners ice hockey team, the prep starts two hours ahead of time at a storage lot north of Highlandtown, the sunlight trickling into the old locker.
Bags are piled high, and shelves are cluttered with sticks, pads and pucks. Most of this stuff needs to get to Mount Pleasant Ice Arena, about a 20-minute drive north — if the Banners coaches were driving straight to practice.
They’re not.
Once a pickup truck and two other cars are loaded with the gear for an hour-and-a-half practice, Jack Burton and his coaches turn over their engines and prepare to get the most important component — the players themselves.
On this particular Saturday in December, eight cars are zigzagging across the city and its surrounding counties to pick up two dozen players — from preteens to long-tenured Banners in their mid-20s, most of them from low-income families in historically Black neighborhoods — for the first ice time they’ve gotten in two weeks.
It’s a delicate operation that requires coordination and improvisation, in addition to double-checking that all the kids are at their designated pickup spots. It’s not unusual for players to move frequently or relocate temporarily with family members or friends.
Some weeks, there aren’t this many volunteers who can help. That’s the biggest challenge, because every player on the Banners needs a ride.
“The hard part is having to call somebody up and saying, ‘We don’t have enough room for you,’” said Burton, the executive director of The Tender Bridge foundation, which has kept the Banners going for the last 22 years. “That’s pretty gutting. So, if we can avoid that, we’d like to.”
A home rink put on ice
All of this used to be easier. Just after Thanksgiving, the Banners learned their home ice at Patterson Park, the Mimi DiPietro Skating Center, wouldn’t be opening on time. The city, which operates the rink, announced the delay the day before the Banners had their first scheduled practice of the season (it is now scheduled to open Saturday).
It was as if the ice had been pulled out from under them, flattening the team before it had even gotten going. It took weeks for the Banners to get some of their gear out of the facility, which itself is on its last legs — the city also announced this will be the final year of the indoor ice rink in the heart of one of the city’s public parks.
The venue shift from Mimi DiPietro to Mount Pleasant may not seem significant, but many of the players live near Patterson Park, either in walking distance or allowing coaches to make back-and-forth shuttles in the Ellwood, North Patterson, Madison and nearby neighborhoods. They could also stash most of their gear, including bags (most players live in homes where they don’t have the room or ability to keep their own equipment) at the Mimi DiPietro facility.
It’s also harder to schedule ice time, because Mount Pleasant is attempting to accommodate those displaced by DiPietro’s delayed opening, which also includes the Baltimore Stars. For the sessions that the Banners get, the coaches and volunteers pick up players who live from Riverdale west of the Beltway to Essex in the east — and a bunch of places in between.
Burton and the other coaches are doing their best to keep the interruption from disrupting the players’ schedules. Hockey is one of the most steadying influences many of them have.
“The whole point of this program is helping them from high-risk adolescence to self-sustaining adulthood … 10, 15 years of their life,” Burton said. “So, as long as as someone’s in the Greater Baltimore area, like we’re still trying to meet them where they are.”
The Banners know how to make do in adverse situations. The players have been doing this their whole lives on and off the ice.
But the scramble of getting gear and players to and from their new rink is a peek into how challenging the coming years will be for the program, which is questioning if losing its Patterson Park home might be the beginning of the end of one of the city’s most unlikely, most inspiring sports programs.
“Everybody like, ‘Damn, we ain’t got Patterson Park,’” said Tavon Phillips, who has played hockey with the Banners for 15 years. “I’m really mad for real, because that’s our home.”
Finding hope in hockey
Before hockey struck Loyalty Burrell squarely in the heart, it was just something her younger siblings did.
Loyalty, 17, is the consummate older sister. She watches out for 13-year-old Savonn, 12 year-old Cartier and 10-year-old Jaxon. When they got involved in the Banners program for elementary-age kids, she tagged along. Admittedly, the kids were drawn in more by the post-practice pizza than the savage grace of hockey.
“They got us food after practice, and I was like, ‘Wow, nobody ever did this for us,’” she said. “Even just like, getting the free food, we’d be good for the rest of the day.”
As she got used to the feeling of balancing on her skates, something made her fall in love with the game in a way many of her peers at Western High School never have understood.
She was hooked, she said, “when I scored my first goal.” She takes pride in being one of the few girls, but she has tried to recruit friends to join.
Loyalty has a regular spot on left defense for the Banners, but at one of the team’s recent Mount Pleasant practices, she was feeling uncharacteristically lonely. None of her sibilings could join that day — their equipment was still stuck at Mimi DiPietro.
They would have to wait two more weeks — which to a kid feels like an eternity — to get on the ice.
The Burrells have it slightly better than some of their teammates. They live near the Mount Pleasant ice rink, and Loyalty helps keep her siblings accountable. But she worries that others who won’t make it to practice, or who will get discouraged by the more irregular ice time, won’t keep on the straight and narrow.
“Playing hockey kept them off the streets and out of certain groups and situations,” Loyalty said, without identifying any teammates but with a grave note of concern in her voice. “They know better. They know what not to do. But, when they go out on the streets, they’re around bad influences for real.”
It’s something the Tender Bridge organizers have to painfully consider. At Mimi DiPietro, the team has regular weekend ice time supplemented by weeknight life skills classes that address off-ice issues such as financial literacy and finding employment. But the break in the pattern can shake up the group and may leave players without much to do during the winter.
Phillips noted during a recent practice that there were 10 to a dozen fewer players on the ice than usual.
“Where we come from, it’s a little hard because when we’re bored there ain’t nothing to do,” he said. “I hope it [Mimi DiPietro] do reopen. I pray and I hope.”
Delaying the inevitable
In one sense, it’s a civic miracle that the Mimi DiPietro Skating Center is still going. There have been several scares before this one that the rink would close for good.
The foundation of the building that supplies the chemicals that keep the rink cold is sinking — the city has known for years that it is unstable. An annual tradition of patchwork fixes keeps folks skating in Patterson Park. Two years ago, it seemed the rink was done for good when a wall collapsed, forcing the Banners and other tenants out for months.
“She’s old, but she’s charming,” Burton said. “Right? But the wheels are falling off, and I think every year the city’s finding itself having to make investments to essentially put a little bit of duct tape on it, keep it up and running.”
But the city’s management of triage for a deteriorating facility has a limit. While the recreation department has spent a lot of time attempting to fix the facility enough so that it can open by January, the declaration that the rink will close this time feels like the real thing after years of staving off fate.
The Banners have known this day was coming, but the future is hard to think about. Before learning that DiPietro was to close, the Banners hoped to go through a round of recruiting — plans that were quickly put on hold. The coaches and volunteers have their hands full carpooling with the players they already have.
It’s a problem for more than just the Banners. Once DiPietro closes, Mount Pleasant — itself a relatively modest facility with a shoebox parking lot — will be the only remaining indoor ice in city limits. That also means no free skating for the neighborhoods by Patterson Park, which for the Burrell family is as much a loss as the relocation of the team.
“We go to free skates, not even just my siblings but the whole team,” Loyalty Burrell said. “Sometimes we really enjoy the free skates.”
The staffers at Tender Bridge hope the city will figure out a solution for a rink at Patterson Park or a comparable location. But the likely budget for a new facility is at least seven figures, and even though Mimi DiPietro’s sinking foundation has been a long time coming, there is no concrete plan — or funding — for a new rink.
“We will try to convince the city that there should still be a rink in Patterson and that the one that’s sitting there right now has got a few more useful years of life on it,” Burton said. “But that’s an uphill battle. They’ve indicated their position.”
The white bubble that houses the skating center looks as fragile as it actually is. The cover is worn and taped together in places, and the seating alongside the rink feels a bit rickety. But, at the same time, it is the Banners’ home. A glass box in the lobby is decorated with the keepsakes of the program’s history, including pictures of its past.
When two players were shot and killed in 2021, the Banners hung tributes to Davon “Peanut” Barnes and Abe Ludd. As painful as the grieving process was, several Banners said at the time it was the closest they ever felt to a team.
For many of these players, the spirit of their teammates remains there, on their home ice.
“It hurt because it’s a different energy when we go out there, and look at the banner. It’s different energy,” Phillips said. “I mean, it’s like yours.”
Someday soon — a day everyone dreads — an East Baltimore storage locker will be the closest thing the Banners have to a home.
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