Recently I travelled to Stockholm Sweden and spent a few days with SmartRink’s Scandinavian distributors. They organized a series of meetings and demonstrations to various organizations. They invited representatives from a hockey high school, a municipality, and several heavy hitters from the Swedish Hockey Federation.

We were using the new ProFast8000-SG with SmartGlide which is our panel with permanently infused glide enhancer.

Of course you would expect me to say that the demos were impressive – and guess what? They were!! The group of trainers from the hockey high school were familiar with a product called Nordic Ice. I’m not even certain who makes the product to be truthful – but it doesn’t really matter. When we asked them how it compared they did not hesitate to respond that the SmartRink synthetic ice material was superior.

There is one thing that unites all hockey players all over the world. They tell it straight up. There is no beating around the bush. They like something or they don’t – and they will tell you. And they did. All four of them were of the opinion that our product was superior. Obviously we were pretty happy about that!

Most importantly though was that our distributors saw first hand how users reacted right away and how pleasantly surprised they were that all those attending the demo were clearly impressed with this product.

Anyway – one of the demos that really stood out for me was when a young goalie tests synthetic ice and was delighted to learn how well the product worked for his lateral slides. He was effortlessly pushing side to side sliding on his pads. I was able to shoot just a few seconds of video but take a look and see for yourself. Unless you are fluent in Swedish you likely wont understand what they are saying…enjoy.

Learn more about synthetic ice for goalies.