Peterka of Mammoth fulfilling ‘dream’ of developing hockey rink in Germany

JJ Peterka was 14 when the idea occurred to him.

He -- and his parents -- had spent so much time in the car in pursuit of his hockey goals, traveling to practice, traveling for tournaments, many of those hours taking them from their home in Munich, Germany, over the border to Czechia in the desperate search for ice.

Why not, he posited, build their own rink?

“He told me, ‘Dad, it’s so awful, why we can’t have our own rink at the house?’” Dennis Peterka recalled his son asking him. “I told him, ‘I’m sorry, it’s not Canada.’”

Initially, Dennis Peterka thought that JJ was considering an outdoor rink. But with temperatures usually hovering around 10 degrees Celsius (50 Fahrenheit) in the winters in Munich, he knew that wasn’t going to work.

He didn’t realize that his son’s ambitions stretched far greater than an outdoor, backyard rink. Peterka, now a forward for the Utah Mammoth, was playing in Austria at the Red Bull Hockey Academy in Salzburg at the time, a dream of a setup compared to what they had in Germany. He was seeing what could be.

At the time, though, there was nowhere to put a rink, so it remained a dream.

As JJ Peterka said, “The idea was out there for a long time.”

Then, he made the NHL.

“When he comes to the NHL and gets professional, he told me, ‘Dad, it’s time to have our own rink,’” Dennis Peterka said, laughing, on the phone from Germany. “I told him, OK, I will look if we can. I don’t make promises. I’ll just look if you can.”

Four years later, four years after Peterka made his NHL debut for the Buffalo Sabres, it is all coming true, all that he dreamt about, all that he hoped for, with JJ Peterka Arena set to open on June 13th to the general public. It comes just four months after NHL players -- Peterka included -- are set to return to the Olympics, with Germany kicking off its schedule against Denmark on Thursday at Rho Arena (3:10 p.m. ET; Peacock, CBC Gem, TSN).

It will be a small-area rink, best for 3-on-3 play, where kids can practice, where professionals can get better, where families can congregate and spend time. It will be exactly what the Peterka family had ached for on all those four-hour (each way) car trips from Munich into Czechia, with good coffee and strong Wi-Fi, an arm out and an arm up to a new generation of German hockey players.

“Our passion, since JJ is playing hockey, it’s hockey,” Dennis Peterka said. “And I told my wife, we have learned so much about hockey, about coaches, about practice, about winning, losing. We made a lot of mistakes in this way, just with JJ. Why not make something for the following generations, help them?

“Germany is not a hockey land. Germany is soccer -- and you have to help all these parents if they have kids who have a passion to be a hockey player. If we help them not to make these mistakes we made, then it’s a great step for them. So that’s the passion for the future.”

* * * *

Back in 2023, Dennis and Natalie Peterka were looking for a new home.

Not a hockey rink. A home.

They found both.

They toured a property in Buchbach, Germany, less than 40 miles outside of Munich, that had a warehouse-type structure that Dennis Peterka described as a “hall” alongside. It was steps away from the house, with all the potential that they had never imagined they would find. As JJ Peterka put it, “It was an easy choice at the end of the day.”

“That was the beginning of the dream for him,” Dennis Peterka said. “So then we started.”

The project was not without its headaches.

They had just started building the interior of the rink when they got word that the roof was unstable, that it had to be removed. Once it was, the rest of the building sat through the winter exposed to the air.

“There was rain falling down in the middle of that and it was really terrible,” Dennis said. “And I told to my wife, I don’t know, it looks like we’re just destroying everything and we’re not building anything.”

Finally, finally, they made progress, turning the rink into what they had envisioned, a hockey rink with a sheet of ice that will remain open all year, unlike many in Germany that are thawed from April to October.

“There were maybe like two places that had ice in the summer,” JJ Peterka said. "That’s why [we always went to] Czechia to play, like three hours away to attend a camp or to try to go on the ice twice a day, something like that. So that always was hard.

“I was a kid, for me it was probably way easier than my parents. I was in the backseat listening to music or something, but for my parents it was definitely hard just getting all those hours [of driving] in, stay there somewhere.”

Which is why the rink will be much more than just ice.

In addition to the ice surface, there will be a café with “great coffee,” according to Dennis, a gym, a golf simulator. There will be a room for rehab and treatment, a physiotherapist. It will be a boon to those parents for whom hockey has become their life.

“You’re sitting in a cold place, you have no Wi-Fi, you have your laptop, your MacBook, and you are just hoping that the battery is going for these two hours and then you’re going home,” Dennis Peterka said. “I told him, just bring these parents here. They will bring the kids on ice and they can work in the café. … Just think about the parents, please.”

When the rink opens, Peterka’s parents will have an additional responsibility: as Zamboni drivers. Though their small Zamboni will eventually become self-driving, they need to helm it at the beginning, about which JJ Peterka said, “He’s pumped.”

Truly, though, Dennis and Natalie are thrilled with it all, as thrilled -- or even more -- than their son.

“I think the project is, it’s just a life fulfillment,” said Dennis Peterka, who has spent his career as a systems administrator in a school. “I told my wife, we can’t do this [until] the end of our life, we have to do something that makes all of us happy and it’s not just work.”

* * * *

When Team Germany walked out for the start of the Olympics, its flag-bearer was someone familiar to fans of the NHL: Edmonton Oilers forward Leon Draisaitl.

His selection was notable in a country where hockey is still making strides, but that currently boasts perhaps its best-ever collection of professional ice hockey talent, including Draisaitl, Peterka, Tim Stutzle (Ottawa Senators) and Moritz Seider (Detroit Red Wings).

To keep that going, to continue to produce talent, to make good on interest generated by the Olympics won’t be easy, though, not if there isn’t enough ice to go around.

“We don’t have infrastructure like North America does as far as the number of ice sheets or rinks,” said Harold Kreis, coach of Team Germany. “There are a lot of smaller organizations that do a lot to recruit younger kids to put some skates on, put some equipment on, just start skating and see if they have some fun with that. But there are challenges as far as ice time.”

Peterka is seeking to change that, to enable more kids to spend more time on the ice, to provide an option closer to home for professionals, to ease the way for Germans in hockey.

“JJ said himself that’s something he didn’t have when he was growing up,” Kreis said. “So he wanted to make it more accessible to the kids in his neighborhood or to kids that maybe have a 20-minute or half-hour drive to get on the ice on the sheet that he’s building. There are clubs that have ice for 11 months or 12 months of the year, but not all of them have that. … JJ’s doing a lot of the kids in his neighborhood a big service.”

He’s doing all of German hockey a service.

Because that’s what it takes, a little bit at a time, starting with one rink.

“It’s hard but we need to grow the game,” said Boston Bruins coach Marco Sturm, who became the first Germany-born head coach in the NHL this season. “We do the best we can, I think, just to get them into rinks and develop as much as we can, but it’s not easy.”

Ten years after JJ Peterka dreamed up the rink, three years after they started building, the arena will open in June. Every day, it gets closer to reality, with the boards being installed in December, the ice and lines in January, more and more every week.

Soon, they hope, it will be teeming with children, with hockey players.

“They’re all super pumped,” JJ Peterka said. “Everyone I know I basically told, and they’ve been asking me for the last like year, when is it going to be done? It’s actually crazy how many people at the end of the day came up, who I never thought they were going to check about that or ask about that.

“I’m going to be excited to see everyone on there.”

NHL.com staff writer Tracey Myers contributed to this report