Hi! Welcome to TheRink. My name is Rich Andrews (also known as Rich@TheRink with my maintenance hat on). I love ice skating and have been on the ice since around 1991 - as far as I can remember, I was so young!
Starting just skating, taking lessons, hanging out with my friends - just wasn't enough for me. At some point in the long distant past, I worked at Chelmsford's Riverside Ice and Leisure as casual staff, taking part in various maintenance activities as well as tending skate hire and ice stewarding.
Sadly, a serious accident on the ice, the injury of which still plagues me to this day, looked to be the end of my skating days, and also put an end to my work at the ice rink too. These were dark days.
Some years later, after some physiotherapy to try to correct mobility issues, coinciding with the opening of Cambridge Ice Arena, I started to build back my love of skating, and in particular my love of the science and engineering behind ice skating was rekindled - with a Masters in Engineering I suppose it was inevitable.
It wasn't long before I got a casual job at Cambridge Ice Arena; general ice assistance to start, but eventually cutting the ice, sharpening skates and most importantly for me, coaching ice hockey with the GLL Learn to Play program (and later on to team coach)!
It was obvious that the UK Ice Skating industry is, in general, lacking experts, with skaters often needing to travel many miles for specialist services, and with many other services performed by consumer grade, automated machines that had a very poor output quality.
It was this fact that caused me to look into how I could give back to the skating community and general public, to advance and promote the sport.
Rich@TheRink was founded off the back of my work at the ice arena, particularly skate sharpening, with one simple aim: To support and nurture all types of ice-skating discipline, using knowledge, experience, and an engineering mindset to really understanding skating technology.
What started as an agreement to help with the arena's public skate sharpening, and provide a couple of additional services through my own business, quickly turned into a full skate maintenance service, including specialist maintenance and repair services for ice hockey and figure skates not readily found anywhere else in the UK.
It quickly became obvious that just performing maintenance and helping people choose skates was not going to be sufficient to achieve my goals of promotion of ice skating, so the business has gradually grown into effectively three different businesses, all centred around "TheRink"
Rich@TheRink is my maintenance and retail business. I am the face of getting into and improving at ice skating (whether that's figure skating or ice hockey). I've helped well in excess of 1,500 individual people over a two year timespan, and continue to have new customers weekly. On the fitting side, as a Member of the Society of Shoe Fitters (MSSF), it's not just about knowing the boots; it's about applying wider footwear-fitting knowledge alongside skate-specific experience, blade alignment, boot modification and on-ice feedback to help skaters choose and adapt skates more carefully.
But to make it even easier for people to get on and enjoy the ice, I have built a free set of tools under TheRink Skater Portal (or Skaters@TheRink, if you will). You can register with just a Google account or mobile phone and make use of these tools, today, for free.
And to support both of these, TheRink Labs (originally called the Skate Engineering Lab). Using my background in engineering I've set up a collaboration site that investigates key areas of interest, all with the aims of improving ice skate equipment manufacture, ice skate mechanics, comfort and safety, and skate technician tooling to take some of the guesswork out of sharpening.
The results speak for themselves. Less profile drift; improved hollow quality and more accurate work. Customers of Rich@TheRink benefit from this today and my hope is skaters will benefit whoever their preferred skate technician is.