A few days ago my friend Matt Leaf from USA Hockey suggested that RinkAtlas needed additional search capabilities for times when our customers didn't know the name of the rink they were trying to locate.
I know that when I played youth hockey years ago we had this problem at least once. My team scheduled a trip to Boston and played a series of games at the rink now known as Matthews Arena, where Northeastern University plays.
In those days the arena was generally known as Boston Arena, but was also referred to by some people as "The Old Boston Garden", since it was the original home of the Boston Bruins and the Boston Celtics.
I don't think the Internet, as we know it today, existed back then. However, I can see that was a case where we would have needed a location-based search capability rather than a rink name-based search.
Here are the features I added to the RinkAtlas search tool:
- Search by City and State: Now if you type "Boston, MA" or "Philadelphia PA", you'll get a list of all of the rinks in the RinkAtlas database with addresses in that city.
- Search by Five Digit Zip Code: If you type "12180" (the main five digit Zip Code for Troy, NY), or some other Zip Code, you'll get a list of rinks in the RinkAtlas database that are physically located within that Zip Code.
- Search by State Abbreviation: If you type a two letter state abbreviation, you'll get a list of all of the rinks located in that state. That's potentially hundreds of rinks in states like Massachusetts, Michigan, and Minnesota, but might make sense for some of the states where there are few indoor ice facilities.
You don't have to enclose your search in quotation marks. The quotation marks above were for illustrative purposes.
Here are a couple of things to keep in mind about these new capabilities:
- Use two-character state abbreviations such as "MA", "NJ", and "GA". If you spell out the name of the state or use a different abbreviation such as "Mass" or "Penn", RinkAtlas won't understand the query.
- Include the city and state together for city / state searches to work properly. The comma between city and state is optional. City names by themselves (such as "Boston") will revert to rink name searches.
- Don't mix rink names with city and state in your search terms. The search parser isn't that sophisticated yet.
If you still have trouble finding a rink in our database, try going back to searching by the rink name, but use a partial name search.
At some point I'm going to build a RinkAtlas help page that will provide more comprehensive search guidance, but that probably won't happen until the U.S. rink database is completed.
