WORCESTER—They skate three shifts every period, do not wear helmets or masks, and are not traded, called up to Bridgeport or released. Therefore, the Railers Ice Crew provides a bit of nostalgic continuity to games at the DCU Center.
There are four consistent crew members and they have been a team for a while. Michael Ossing is the oldest at 65. The others are all 30-somethings and include longtime friends Zoey Zukowski and Kaylin Ossing as well as Josh Channell.
The Ossings are from Marlborough and are father and daughter. Kaylin Ossing and Zukowski go back a long way. They worked together for the Manchester Monarchs, both the AHL and ECHL varieties. Channell is from Whitman originally but now lives just down the road in Sutton.
Different ages. Different backgrounds. There is at least one thing in common, though. They love the job.
“We all get along seamlessly, and it is a blast,” said Channell, a sixth-grade teacher in Worcester. “In my mind it’s not even a job. Summers seem so long now that I dread summer.”
Ice Crew members have various behind-the-scenes duties and get to the rink before doors open to the public. They are best known, however, for scraping snow off the ice surface and into the Bath Fitter tub during breaks and sending T-shirts into the crowd.
That means they have to be able to skate.
Michael learned to skate on the lakes and ponds of Marlboro and now plays for the Rusty Blades senior team. He was recruited for the Ice Crew by daughter Kaylin. Skating is a pastime that helped him get this post-retirement gig.
His full-time gig was as a nuclear engineer at Seabrook. He is also president of the Marlboro City Council. The nuclear engineering job paid better than the Ice Crew does. However, he might be fonder of the DCU thing than the Seabrook one.
“I’m having a ball,” he said. “I would have done this as a fulltime job if I could have made a living out of it, and to be fair, I’m working with my daughter and it doesn’t get any better than being out on the ice with your daughter.”
Zukowski grew up in Spencer and attended St. Mary’s High in the city. Her fulltime job is an apprentice electrician with the IBEW Local 96 in the city. Zukowski is usually easy to pick out on the ice since she tends to dress uniquely.
“It gives me a chance to express my creative side,” she said. “Electricians don’t get to be creative very often.”
Kaylin has been playing hockey for about 10 years. She lives in Manchester, N.H. and works at Medicus Health Care Solutions, but can stay in Marlboro for games. While she seems composed on the ice, that is not necessarily the case.
“I’m always nervous,” she said. “There is no place to hide. If we’re entertaining on the ice and you fall, everyone sees it. Zoey and I have fallen and when you do you can hear the crowd go, ‘ooooh.”
Fans, and not just the hockey kind, can be illogical. Millionaires will act like idiots to get shown on the video board. Also, for some reason, a $10 T-shirt you catch at a game is a bigger deal than a $25 one bought in the concourse.
Throwing, or shooting them, into the stands is one of the ice crew’s most important tasks.
“People always want something, some tape, a towel, a puck, a bottle,” Channell said of his T-shirt strategy. “When the crowds are bigger, you just send ‘em in a general direction. When they’re smaller, you can definitely aim. I try to pick out the kids. The gun is not as consistent, but with that I try to go to the upper deck or behind the nets.
“Those fans don’t get too many T-shirts.”
Three of the four crew members are long-term skaters. Zukowski, though, learned to skate looking at YouTube. She has also worked for the Bruins. Her assignment when cleaning the DCU Center ice is along the players’ benches, so she gets to interact with them more than other crew members.
“Things happen near the benches,” she said. “There are sticks and skates, players spit, they bump into you, but they’re very nice about it. They always say they’re sorry.”
If crew members are not exactly celebrities, they are recognizable within the confines of the DCU Center.
“If we go upstairs after the doors are open,” Kaylin Ossing said, “you’ll hear people say ‘Oh, it’s the ice crew.’ We’ll get asked to do pictures with some of the fans.”
Autographs, not so much. Which is OK with Zukowski.
“I hate signing autographs,” she said. “My handwriting is terrible.”
Crew members are like goalies without the masks. Everyone sees their misplays and they are a fact of life, which is part of the job description.
“Among the ice crew,” Michael said, “we sort of have a competition about who falls down the most, or if you don’t get a T-shirt over the glass, and you hear about it.”
They do not, however, get called for tripping, slashing, spearing, roughing, etc. but being in the Railers Ice Crew is about as close as anyone can get to being in the game without having to worry about the stitches.
Bill Ballou covered the Red Sox for the Worcester Telegram from 1997 through 2018. He has covered pro hockey in Worcester since 1994 and currently does a weekly column for the Worcester Red Sox. Ballou can be reached at vetgoalie@aol.com
