Drive down Haley Industrial Drive in Nolensville and nothing about the building suggests what's inside. Metal siding, a loading dock, the kind of anonymous roll-up door you'd expect to hide a tile warehouse or a HVAC supply house. Then you open the front door and the air changes. It's cold enough to see your breath, a Zamboni is finishing a pass, and a group of ten-year-olds in full hockey gear is lacing up for practice.
This is Gary Force Acura Ice Arena, and for five years it has quietly held a distinction almost nobody in Williamson County talks about: it's the only public ice rink in the entire county. Not Franklin. Not Brentwood. Nolensville.
That distinction is now about to get company, or at least a serious challenger, from a very different corner of the county. Understanding both halves of this story tells you something real about how Nolensville fits into Williamson County's recreation map, and why that map is shifting.
An Industrial Park Rink With a Full-Size Sheet
Gary Force Acura Ice Arena sits at 7235 Haley Industrial Drive and has served the area since 2021. The building started life as an indoor soccer facility before it was converted for hockey, which explains the slightly improvised feel some visitors notice. One Yelp reviewer summed up the tradeoff bluntly, calling it a rink in the middle of "a very rural but growing area" that was, despite the rough edges, "a nice place for a little hockey."
The sheet itself is full NHL size, which matters more than it sounds. A lot of rinks marketed to families are shortened recreational sheets. Gary Force built for real hockey, and it shows in who uses it. The rink is home to the Nashville Warriors Youth Hockey Club, runs a local adult league that plays regular season games there, and hosts figure skating alongside the hockey programming. Public skate, stick and puck, and freestyle sessions are all booked through the rink's own online events calendar rather than the DaySmart system used by the Nashville-area rinks across the county line, so if you're used to registering at Centennial Sportsplex or a Ford Ice Center, the process here is a little different. Pricing for open skate isn't posted on the site itself, which means the calendar is also where you confirm cost before you show up.
None of that would be particularly newsworthy on its own. What makes it worth noticing is the geography. Brentwood doesn't have a public rink. Franklin doesn't have one. Spring Hill doesn't have one. For five years, if you wanted to skate without leaving Williamson County, Nolensville was the only option, and it got there first not because of a grand plan but because a soccer building happened to convert well.
The Demand This Was Quietly Absorbing
The scale of unmet demand across the rest of the county is easier to see now that a developer has put a number on it. According to figures the Nashville Predators organization has shared around a newly proposed Franklin project, Franklin families alone currently make roughly 60,000 trips a year to ice rinks in the Nashville area, almost all of it crossing into Davidson County to reach Centennial Sportsplex or one of the three Ford Ice Centers.
That's a lot of driving for a sport, and it's the exact gap Gary Force has been filling for Nolensville, Brentwood, and parts of Franklin close enough to make the shorter trip south instead of north. The rink was never marketed as a regional solution to Williamson County's ice shortage. It just ended up being one, five years before anyone in Franklin proposed building something bigger.
Franklin's Answer Is Still Just a Proposal
In June 2026, a developer pitched a plan that would change this picture. The project is called The Banks at Brownland, and it would transform Brownland Farm, a 233-acre property on Hillsboro Road that has hosted local, regional, and national equestrian events for more than 60 years, into a mixed-use sports and retail complex.
The centerpiece would be a 100,000-square-foot ice facility with two sheets, operated by the Nashville Predators, similar to the arrangement the team already has at its Ford Ice Centers in Nashville and Bellevue. Around it, the plan calls for 11 multipurpose fields for football, soccer, and lacrosse, a golf practice facility with a tech-driven driving range, and neighborhood retail including restaurants, a grocery store, fitness centers, and medical offices. The developer has also agreed to donate six acres of the site to GraceWorks Ministries for a permanent facility, folding a nonprofit partner into the plan alongside the athletic build-out.
Coverage of the proposal describes it as the first public facility of its kind in Williamson County, which is accurate in a narrower sense than it first sounds. Gary Force already gives the county a public rink. What Brownland would add is something Gary Force isn't: an NHL-branded, two-sheet facility built and marketed at the scale of the Nashville organization's other centers, with the kind of programming budget and visibility that comes with that backing. It's less a replacement for what Nolensville already has and more a much bigger sibling arriving late.
It's also, for now, only a proposal. The plan still has to go before Franklin's aldermen and county commissioners for approval, and the developer's own timeline points to a 2027 groundbreaking if that approval comes through. Some neighbors near Brownland Farm have already raised concerns about what the project would mean for daily life on that stretch of Hillsboro Road, including added traffic on Mack Hatcher Parkway, which currently runs just two lanes across that section. Nothing about the ice arena itself is contested. The friction is over scale, on a piece of land that has functioned as horse country for six decades.
What This Means If You Already Skate at Gary Force
None of this changes anything about Gary Force Acura Ice Arena in the near term. The rink isn't part of the Brownland proposal, isn't owned by the same group, and isn't positioned as a competitor in any of the public discussion around the Franklin plan. The Nashville Warriors youth program, the adult league, and the open skate calendar all continue on exactly the schedule they've run for five years.
What does change, slowly, is Nolensville's specific claim to being the only place in the county where you can skate without crossing into Nashville. If Brownland moves forward on the timeline the developer has floated, that distinction becomes shared rather than singular sometime around 2027 or later. Until an approval actually happens, that's a multi-year-out possibility, not a current fact on the ground.
A few things worth knowing if you're planning to use the rink this fall or winter:
- Booking for public skate, stick and puck, and freestyle sessions runs through Gary Force's own online calendar rather than a shared regional system.
- Pricing for public sessions isn't posted on the main site, so check the calendar directly before you head over.
- The rink runs youth hockey through the Nashville Warriors club and hosts a local adult league, so ice time during peak evening hours can fill up around team practices and league games.
- The building's origin as a converted soccer facility means some flooring outside the rink itself, particularly in the locker rooms, isn't built for skate blades.
For now, the sheet on Haley Industrial Drive is still the only game in the county, sitting inside a building that gives away nothing about what's happening on the other side of the door.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood's recreation options and nearby development plans might mean for your own move in Nolensville or Franklin, Robert Young is glad to walk through it with you. Schedule your free market consultation.
