Twenty-eight years. Zero missed payments. One Olympic gold medalist trained. And none of it was enough.
VSC Sports ran the Yerba Buena Ice Skating & Bowling Center in San Francisco for nearly three decades — through recessions, pandemics, and everything the city could throw at them. They never missed a rent check. They built a legitimate skating program. They produced Alysa Liu, the Olympic gold medalist who put that rink on the international map. And when lease renewal time came around, the Yerba Buena Gardens Conservancy said thanks, but no thanks — with zero explanation.
No feedback. No improvement plan. No conversation. Just: you're out.
What 28 Years of Loyalty Gets You
The operator says he never once received feedback about what he was doing wrong or what needed to change. There was one point of friction — he pushed back on a refrigeration upgrade — but that's it. One disagreement in 28 years. The Conservancy apparently decided that was enough.
Here's where it gets really infuriating: after kicking out the team that kept the rink alive for three decades, the Conservancy handed operations to a nonprofit with zero ice rink experience. Then they dropped $600,000 into a summer renovation before reopening under new management. So the money was apparently there all along — they just decided to spend it on someone else's learning curve instead of the people who actually knew what they were doing.
This isn't just a San Francisco story. This is what happens when real estate entities treat community institutions like swappable tenants instead of irreplaceable assets. The rink is still there. The knowledge, the relationships, the two-decade-plus culture of skating in that building? Gone.
What Gets Lost When Operators Get Pushed Out
People underestimate how much institutional knowledge lives inside a rink operation. The coaches who showed up because they trusted the management. The families who built their schedules around those ice times. The culture of a facility that trains Olympic athletes — you don't just replicate that by writing a bigger check to a new tenant.
VSC Sports built something real at Yerba Buena. Alysa Liu didn't become an Olympic champion by accident — she did it because there was a functioning, serious skating environment in that building. The Conservancy inherited all of that equity and handed it to someone who's never run a rink before.
The rink is open again. Whether the skating community will be the same is a different question entirely.
The Ice Has to Keep Going
Stories like this are why we think about ice skating differently than most. It's not just a sport — it's infrastructure. Community infrastructure. When it disappears or gets mismanaged, real people lose their home ice.
We fight to keep our prices low and our quality high — because helping sustain your rink's overhead and supporting your skaters with high-quality equipment is exactly what we're here for.