Ice Hockey in the Desert — The Story of Hockey in Dubai

There is real ice hockey in the desert

It still surprises people. You land in Dubai expecting beaches, brunch and skyscrapers, and instead you find a full Olympic-size rink, a training sheet next door, a senior team in the Emirates Hockey League and an under-12 squad coming off a Junior Hockey League gold medal. Galaxy Hockey Academy is the UAE's largest ice hockey club — not a novelty, not a one-rink hobby, but a proper academy with a pyramid from Mini-Mites to adult league, run by people who grew up in the game and brought it with them.

Two rinks, one academy

The academy lives inside Sport Society, Mirdif — a ten-minute drive from most of Dubai's family neighbourhoods, and an easy run from Sharjah. There are two sheets of ice under one roof.

The main arena is a full 60×30 metre international rink: this is where the older groups skate, where the Warriors play their EHL home games, and where adult sessions run late into the evening. Next door, the training rink is sized for the youngest skaters — U6, U8 and U10 — so a five-year-old in their first set of skates isn't lost on an Olympic sheet.

Two rinks means we can run a proper schedule. Mini-Mites and Mites in the morning, school groups midday, age-group practices through the afternoon, adult sessions and league games at night. Nothing waits its turn for ice.

From Mini-Mites to the Emirates Hockey League

The structure is the structure you'd find in Helsinki or Toronto, just compressed into one building.

• Training rink: U6, U8, U10 — learning to skate, learning to fall, learning to love it.
• Main rink: U12, U14, U16, U17 — competitive squads playing in the Junior Hockey League. Last season: U9 gold, U12 gold, U18 bronze.
• Adults: open adult sessions plus the Galaxy Hockey League — seven teams, October to April, beer-league spirit with actual hockey underneath.
• Top of the pyramid: the Galaxy Warriors in purple, competing in the Emirates Hockey League, jerseys carrying the AMYLCO crest.

There is one team per age group, and that's deliberate. We'd rather have one strong squad per year than dilute the bench.

Built by people who came from somewhere else

Almost everyone in this building arrived from a hockey country and decided Dubai was going to be one too.

The head coach is Artiom Senkevich, a former KHL player and former head coach of the UAE national team. Alongside him on the bench: Maxim Saveliev and Oleg Ignatiev, both career coaches from the post-Soviet hockey school. The academy was founded by Iurii Lomakin and Vladislav Lomakin, and counts NHL legend Alexei Yashin among its advisors.

The families are the same story in reverse. Russians, Canadians, Czechs, Finns, Kazakhs, Emiratis whose kids fell in love with the rink on a school trip. The common language at the boards is broken English with a little Russian thrown in, and it works just fine.

"You don't build a hockey city by waiting for one. You build the ice, you bring the coaches, and the kids come." — a parent at last weekend's U10 practice