Eliska Good mainly owes her hockey career to the ice rink at Memorial City Mall — so, when she heard it was closing, she fought to save it. The junior and her family have been part of the campaign Save Memorial Ice Rink since the spring, after MetroNational, the company that owns Memorial City Mall, announced the rink’s closure on July 31.

“In the ice hockey community in Houston, there’s only a few thousand of us — not a huge community,” Good said. “[The protest] was enough to show that we’re still here, but not enough to actually cause a problem that would upset MetroNational.”

MetroNational informed the public in April that they planned to demolish the ice rink in preparation for expanding the mall. The announcement prompted a swift outcry, including a petition from the hockey and figure skating communities that claimed MetroNational did not solicit any public input for the removal of a well-known public space. The petition has garnered more than 9,000 signatures on their petition through public protests and social media outreach.

For Houston’s hockey community, which contains around 6,000 players and supporters, Memorial Ice Rink is one of only three regulation-sized rinks where teams get open ice time to practice. Centrally located in the city, it is a convenient place for players of all ages to learn how to skate or attend practice.

Good would not have been able to play hockey if Memorial’s rink did not give her mother proof that there was ice available in Houston. Since the rink was there, Good has been skating since she was six years old and playing travel hockey since she was 13.

While her team, the Dallas Stars Elite, does not practice at Memorial’s ice rink, Good attended separate stick handling training on Fridays at 5 a.m. at Memorial’s rink.

“Memorial is the closest rink to us: only an eight minute drive at 5 a.m. If we had to get to any of the other rinks, like Sugarland, which is the farthest one, I’d probably have to wake up at 4:15 a.m.,” Good said. “It’s such a stretch, especially with high school.”

The absence of the ice rink, Good predicts, would lead to players enduring longer commute times and congestion on other ice rinks.

“Realistically, there’s basically no open ice time in Houston. So just getting more people in less rinks is really not going to work,” Good said.

If not competitive hockey, players in Houston can be part of the house league, a recreational matchup between rinks like Memorial or the Sugarland Ice and Sports Center. Good and her mother used to coach Good’s brother, who played for Memorial City. Without the rink, he and his teammates will have to play somewhere else—a dilemma Good felt passionate enough about to address through protesting.

“I’m not really doing it so much for me but for them,” Good said. “I want them to have a good skating experience and I don’t want them to have to quit hockey because it’s just too far away.”

Protesting against MetroNational in order to save the ice rink became a Good family affair. In between hockey practice and ACT studying, Good and her family made signs and gathered in Willow Bend Park with around 50 fellow protesters.

At the protest, Good listed out the reasons why she cannot “just go to another ice rink” in a viral TikTok video that has garnered around 46,000 views as of publication.

Beyond holding signs, Good and her mother spoke in front of Houston’s City Council. Good’s job was to ask John Whitmire, the mayor of Houston, if he could drop the puck at the Memorial rink’s annual Firefighters vs. Police charity game, which will occur this year on July 11. Whitmire was not in attendance, but Good still felt like out of all her advocacy work, speaking in front of city council was “actually doing something because we were talking to people who could directly help us.”

Even though the closure and demolition of the ice rink seems to only impact current skaters and hockey players, Good predicts that it will have broader repercussions. Good says Memorial City Mall will have less customers, as many visitors come to skate at the ice rink, and that its closure will slow the growth of hockey in Houston.

“At Memorial City, there’s a lot of people who don’t even know ice hockey exists, and there’s a lot of little kids that come up there, and they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s so cool,’” Good said. “And I just hope that maybe they’ll want to try on a pair of skates, too. You can’t get that publicity anywhere else, really.”

Rising junior Kit Phillips comes to Memorial City Mall four times a year to skate. When Phillips was five, her family took her to the ice rink as a surprise, and since then skating excursions are a special tradition in her family.

“I associate it with fun times in childhood. It’s kind of an escape from a lot of stuff that goes on in the world,” Phillips said. “It’s a pretty magical place.”

Phillips, who considers herself a beginner skater, says that she feels like the environment at the rink is friendly and the skating experience never becomes boring.

“Everyone’s always so nice there, and you often do see familiar faces,” Phillips said. “I’ll miss the sense of community you could get out of it even if you’re not talking to anyone or meeting anyone.”

Rising senior and staff writer William Liang is not an ice skater or a hockey player. He did not know that the Memorial Ice Rink existed until about a year ago. Curiosity piqued, he went to look at it, but he only saw one person on the ice. He says that his friends also do not know that much about the rink.

“It’s pretty buried in the mall,” he said.

Liang, who has lived in Memorial for his whole life, has seen the neighborhood expand with new restaurants and updated venues. MetroNational’s plan for Memorial City Mall includes converting the ice rink into a parking lot. While Liang says that there is already an “excessive amount” of parking in Memorial, he looks forward to a renovated mall.

“You’ve got to make space, and in order to make space, you’ve got to sacrifice some stuff, which just happens to be the ice rink,” Liang said. “I guess human nature is to not like change, but sometimes change is necessary. This is a move that, looking back, will become a very needed move.”

Good says that MetroNational’s decision is final and that the rink will close. For her family, though, the news is not a cause for despair. Instead, they are shifting gears with the majority of Save Memorial Ice Rink.

The movement is now asking for funding to build a new rink in the Memorial area. Good’s mother is meeting with real estate experts to figure out a location that can fit a regulation-sized rink.

“If you really want to protest for something, don’t just hope for one outcome. Look for what’s really the issue,” Good said. “We’re just trying to solve location issues and population management issues.”

Since Phillips considers Houston the “construction capital” of the nation, she will not be surprised if the rink does close. But, she will still remember the happiness she felt there.

“Other people aren’t going to be able to go there with their kids and have them experience that joy either. It’s going to be so sad,” Phillips said. “I don’t have something to beg my family to do every time I’m in Memorial, and every time I go over there, I’m going to remember that it is gone.”