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Enoch rink hosts first hockey game in southern Utah in four years

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ENOCH, Utah — The barn has been raised in Enoch. Except in this barn, the surface is ice, and it's full of hockey players banging against the boards.

Despite the arrival of the Utah Hockey Club, there hasn’t been an ice hockey rink in Utah south of Provo since 2020. That changed Friday night with the opening of an ice hockey barn in Enoch, just north of Cedar City.

KJ’s Ice Barn opened its doors Friday night as the only ice skating and hockey facility in Southern Utah.

The last such facility, The Glacier in Cedar City, closed in 2020.

The soft opening featured a different kind of Friday night lights: The first high school hockey games in Southern Utah in four years.

For Enoch resident Sue Abbiss, it was the first hockey game she had ever seen.

“ I think it will be exciting,” Abbiss said. “Yeah, something new in the area.”

KJ’s Ice Barn started to rise two years ago from an empty field a couple of hundred yards from I-15 as the dream of Kerry Jo Fain, a lifelong hockey fan. She was not there to see her dream fulfilled Friday night. She died of colon cancer at age 42.

But her family has carried on that dream and the legacy was hitting, falling and scoring on the ice.

It also drew people from all over Southern Utah, including some who drove about an hour north from St. George.

“I just always loved hockey, so I always dreamed of an opportunity for my kids to play,” said St. George resident Jonathan Edie, who brought along his hockey-loving kids. “I wasn't counting on that happening in St. George anytime soon.”

The Red Rock Youth Hockey Club has existed in Southern Utah for a couple of years, but without ice, it’s hockey players have only played ball hockey.

“Yeah, I am good at ice skating. I don't know if I'd be good at playing hockey and also ice skating,” Red Rock Hockey goalie Skylee Henwood, 12, said. Because like I faceplant every single time but yeah I think it will be fun to be able to actually try to do that as an option.”

On Friday night, the Southern Utah Independent Yetis consisting of high school players from throughout Southern Utah took on the Tooele Outlaws. And at least the JV held their own, taking the more experienced Tooele to overtime.

A junior hockey team, the Southern Utah Yeti, will be calling the barn their home ice. Yeti was adopted as the nickname and KJ’s Ice Barn’s mascot at least a year before it became one of the possible nicknames for the Utah Hockey Club.

There's one more connection between KJ's Ice Barn and the Utah Hockey Club. The Zamboni? It used to belong to the Glendale arena that housed the Arizona Coyotes two years before they moved to Salt Lake City.

They got it pretty cheap.