Inside the meticulous process of making the Flyers’ ice at the Wells Fargo Center

As Eddie Vedder finished belting out “Yellow Ledbetter,” and the last chord was struck, time began ticking at the Wells Fargo Center.

Like Cinderella when the clock struck midnight, the floor in the arena was changing back. It was time to make the ice for the 2024-25 Flyers season.

If you think this is an easy process, it is not. This isn’t like filling your ice tray to make ice in your freezer. This is a meticulous step-by-step process to make the ice come alive. Because, if it is not followed to a tee, the guys in charge will surely hear about it.

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The temperature inside the Wells Fargo Center started to drop around midnight, once Pearl Jam was done jamming and the band’s equipment and the stage were cleared out. The concrete floor is cleaned as it begins to chill. It may have been the early hours of Sept. 10 but a parka probably would have helped as the floor’s temperature must hit 16 degrees Fahrenheit before any work can begin.

While it takes about three days to get the ice perfect, the process was actually months in the making. As Tim Allen, the vice president of operations at the Wells Fargo Center, told The Inquirer, “We don’t try to turn our chiller on today and go oh, things aren’t working.” So once the Flyers season ended in April, the ice was melted and removed — a relatively quick process — and then came the inspections, maintenance, and tests for the concrete floor, the refrigeration system, and all of the equipment.

By noon on Sept. 10, the first drop of water hit the ground.

Like sheets of empty canvas, water is slowly laid down over the course of hours. It’s a slow undertaking as each layer needs to dry before the next can be placed down.

“When it comes to building ice, you don’t want to put water on top of water that hasn’t frozen yet,” Chris Jennings, the ice crew manager at the Wells Fargo Center told The Inquirer. “So we go spray it. It takes about 10 minutes, 15 minutes to freeze entirely, and then we’re ready to go again.

“Dumping out one inch of water won’t make good hockey ice,” he added. “It’ll crumble apart under the players skates because it traps more oxygen.”

The first step is to seal the concrete floor with water, which Jennings does by driving the Zamboni around four times. He uses the sprayers on the back to lay about a 16th of an inch of water.

Next comes more water but this time it is mixed with the white powder-based paint that makes the players pop and the puck even more noticeable. This process, which entails about 300 gallons of the mixture, is done manually by four people walking around with a single spray bar. Three coats are laid down and then sealed by hand to avoid leaving Zamboni tire tracks in the fresh paint.

At 4:30 p.m., the fun began.

Carpenters mark the lines for the painters, lining each up with markers on the dasher boards that line the rink. They use a string coated in blue chalk to snap down the edges, with each line measured over and over again to ensure it is perfect. Templates, that have cutouts, are used for the crease and hash marks. The circles, like those big faceoff circles, are created in a similar process like a protractor one uses in elementary school for geometry.

“We have points that we put in ahead of time, so that when the time comes and we come out here, it’s just everything seems to flow,” Stephen Ryan, a carpenter who has been helping to create the ice for four years, told The Inquirer. “We snap the lines, they paint, we have the templates all made, so it seems to run smoothly right here.”

“This paint literally dries as you put it on [the ice],” South Philly’s John Lawton told The Inquirer as he was painting a trapezoid. A painter for 25 years, this was his first time painting the ice at the arena. “It’s actually really exciting,” he said.

As each drop of paint is laid down, it is sealed by water sprayed from a bottle akin to the kind that typically holds bug spray. The logos, from center ice to all the marketing ads on the ice, are printed on textile fabric with small perforations and laid down. They are sealed with water too.

And then the floodgates are open.

Like a waterfall gushing with water in the middle of a fjord in Norway, the ice then gets flooded with water.

The process began around 11 p.m. on Sept. 10 with a by-hand sealing of the ice. It was an arduous task with each flooding helping to build the ice to a thickness of 1 inch.

This final stage ended Thursday with the final pass by the Zamboni and the FastIce Zamboni system, which is an electric system that facilitates a more efficient process to avoid any issues with the ice. It allows for more control and automates a specific percentage of water to make sure each layer is perfectly replicated.

By the end of the entire process, roughly 10,000 gallons of water lay atop the concrete flooring at the Wells Fargo Center.

No need to pitter-patter. Yes, the double logo is back.

Hearkening back to the days of Ed Snider, the double Flyers logo at center ice returned last season. This specific design was originally a hallmark at the Spectrum and in the early days of the Wells Fargo Center. The late team owner preferred the two logos so that the red line didn’t cut it in half.

Although the ice is laid down before the season begins, it is an ever-evolving process to maintain it to the level needed for NHL action.

On nongame days, the crew can spend anywhere from 12 to 22 hours building the ice back up to an inch to 1¼ inches if there is a stretch of home games.

“A large portion of our job outside of the game is building ice back,” Jennings said. “If you look at it, we’re shaving off ice each intermission that we go out. In the morning, there’s a layer of debris and dirt from, like if we were covered up from a previous event, we’re shaving under that to get that dirt off. Morning skates or game days, we’re resurfacing again. And if there’s any other ancillary events in the afternoon or postgame, we’re shaving again.

“So it’ll disappear quick, and it takes longer to build, almost like a two-to-one ratio of building back, as opposed to what you take off.”

Jennings and his crew will make adjustments to the ice throughout the season too, like when Disney on Ice comes after Christmas and they have to place a smaller ice surface on top of the Flyers layer. They’ll also make tweaks based on feedback from the NHL’s referees and linesmen, and the Flyers.

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“I feel we let, maybe not [Jennings] directly but management, people around, know how we like the ice, if it’s good or bad — usually when there’s no feedback, no complaints that means it’s good. But when the ice is soft, or chippy, or pucks are bouncing around I guess we complain a little bit,” Sean Couturier told The Inquirer.

When asked if it’s good ice, the Flyers captain said, “Yeah, I think so.”

The Flyers will get their chance to test out the 2024-25 edition on Thursday, as they take on the New York Islanders in their preseason home opener at the Wells Fargo Center (7 p.m., NBCSP).