About RinkIndex

RinkIndex is a directory of hockey in Western New York and the Rochester area — rinks, organizations, teams, leagues, coaches, camps, clinics, tryouts, tournaments, and the businesses around them. It exists so that finding a clinic does not mean checking six rink websites, a couple of Facebook groups, and a PDF somebody posted in a team chat.

It is run by Sean, a hockey parent in Williamsville, and it started for the reason on the front page: he went looking for a camp for his daughters and found out about one the week after it ran.

It is not owned by a rink, a league, or an organization, and no listing is paid for. Nobody buys a better position on this site, because there is nothing to buy.

Entity information — names, addresses, phone numbers, websites, descriptions — comes from public sources: an organization's own website, its social media, business registries, and local news.

Schedules come from the operators' own pages. A crawler reads published programme listings from rink and organization websites on a nightly pass and records, for every event, the page it came from. That is why a rink page here links out to the rink's own calendar rather than trying to become a replacement for it: the operator's page is the authority, and a copy left to drift is worse than no copy.

The crawler is documented in full, including its user agent, its contact address, what it does and does not collect, and how to block it, at /about/crawler. That page is written for site owners rather than for parents, but nothing in it is hidden from anyone.

Every listing and event carries one of four states, and the wording is chosen carefully because the distinction is the entire point.

“Checked — date” means somebody here compared this record against the operator's own published information on that date. It is not a confirmation from the operator. Nobody was called.

“Checked — date — due another look” means the same thing, more than a month ago. Confirm anything time-sensitive directly with the operator.

“Last seen — date” means the crawler successfully read this from the operator's own page on that date and nobody here has checked the details by hand. It is a real signal and a weaker one, and it says so.

A record with none of these has not been confirmed at all, and its page says that in a banner rather than in a quiet line — “we don't know” deserves more room than a small grey label.

It is not complete. Rinks and organizations are close to it; camps, clinics and tryouts are not, and that gap is the part still being built. Very few organizations in the region publish a dated clinic anywhere a machine can read, so the calendar reflects what is publishable, not everything that is happening.

A missing programme is not evidence a programme does not exist. It usually means it was announced in a Facebook post or a team email, which is exactly the problem this site was built about.

Prices, times and age groups change after they are published. Where something matters — registration deadlines, tryout dates, cost — check the operator's own page, which is linked from every listing.

If a listing is yours, you can claim it and correct it. If something is simply wrong, report it, and it goes to a person rather than a queue. If you run a camp, clinic, tryout or open skate that is not here, send the dates and they will be listed. None of these cost anything.

Corrections are the fastest way this gets better, and an operator correcting their own entry is worth more than any amount of crawling.