Hundreds turned out Friday to celebrate the opening of The Rink, the city’s multipurpose arena situated beside the Santa Clarita Sports Complex on Centre Pointe Parkway.
Mayor Laurene Weste called the ribbon cutting for the $28 million facility a great day for Santa Clarita, a yearslong effort come to fruition.
The first wheels to hit the floor Friday belonged to staffers from The Rink, followed immediately by the Skating Mamas of the SCV, a group credited as part of the driving push behind The Rink, and various members of the community.
“You can tell it’s going to be a really popular place, and it’s bringing the community together,” said Dawn Walker, a founding member of the skating group, which began in 2021 during the pandemic. “And kids, they don’t have to sit on their devices. They have a place to go and hang out and get exercise.”
Weste said she was thrilled so many people turned out — a parks official said 350 people had signed up for each of the two afternoon sessions planned — adding that her enjoyment of roller skating started at age 5.
She said the request for such a facility goes back decades, but questions lingered about whether there would be enough community demand to sustain it.
And then the pandemic hit.
A social media-based, social-distancing-friendly group, the Skating Mamas of the SCV, started on Facebook and quickly grew. There are now about 1,700 members, Walker said. In the beginning, they would mask up and roll around the basketball courts at local parks, she added.
Weste said the city recognized an opportunity.
“I saw the change when COVID happened. COVID happened, and people needed to be able to do something where they could enjoy being outdoors or somewhere to do an activity and kind of be free from all the stress,” she said. “The roller-skating mamas came on, and I went to (City Manager) Ken (Striplin) and I said, ‘If you don’t think that we need this, watch them.’”
After a few opening remarks from elected officials, skaters of all skill levels, young and old, hit the floor, rolling and grooving under The Rink’s disco ball.
Weste was also happy with how the building and plans had grown in scope, offering residents brand-new volleyball, basketball and pickleball courts — though not at the same time as the skating, she joked.
Sivan Nabati was one of the community members registered for the city’s first skating session. She said she was glad to be able to bring her kids to a much closer facility; before The Rink opened, she had to take her children to Ventura to skate.
Others mentioned previously going to Skateland in Northridge, which, ironically, closed during the pandemic.
The Rink’s journey officially began Aug. 30, 2024, with a groundbreaking ceremony behind the city’s Sports Complex, where The Rink now stands on Centre Pointe Parkway. But it’s actually the Santa Clarita Valley’s third skating space, not counting ice rinks. The previous two were private businesses that opened and closed before the city’s formation.
The grand opening of Rollerama, a “skating rink … in Saugus,” was announced in a massive full-page feature in the Oct. 11, 1960, edition of The Signal. The Signal’s archives make no mention of the rink after 1967, except as the former home of Rollerama, a “big Quonset hut” near Saugus Junction.
Skate ‘N Place opened in 1978 and had its heyday in the 1980s. The exact closure date was not immediately available, but by November 1987, the space on Golden Triangle Road where MB2 now sits was being referred to as the former site of Skate ‘N Place.
