When Alex Toulemonde moved to Vancouver from France, he figured he was coming to the right place to indulge his passion for playing hockey.

He couldn’t even find a recreational team to play on.

It was that frustration that led Toulemonde and his roommates Daniel Yew and Martine Yen to create their own solution — the newly launched hockey-community.com, a website that puts social media on skates and delivers everything from rink times to pickup games.

“When Alex came to Canada from France, he had been playing hockey when he was younger and he looked forward to playing here; he was expecting to be overloaded with hockey when he came to Canada but that wasn’t the case because he didn’t know the people to connect with,” said Yew, a civil engineer who is in his second year of playing recreational ice hockey, after playing street hockey and roller hockey when he was growing up. “That’s where the idea came from.”

The website has launched in beta, with 2,600 rinks in Canada listed and plans to add ones in the United States next.

“We want to make hockey more accessible,” said Yen. “You can find a rink, you can book a time.

“You can find the closest rink to you and you can organize a game and get people to join or find a game and sign up for it.”

Yen said the Hockey Community has created software so rinks can update their information. Additional features, like the ability to book ice times, will be added as the site develops. The founders have been working on the launch since last May and also have an iPhone app in the works. It is expected out late this year or early next.

Wesley Ong was among the first to sign up at hockey-community.com. A recreational hockey player who played at Burnaby 8 Rinks and now at the Richmond oval, Ong found the logistics around organizing practices and pickup games daunting, a long process involving a lot of calls to hockey rinks and contacting players to line up times.

“The thing about the Hockey Community is that you post it on there and players can all sign up and join in games,” said Ong. “It’s actually quite a unique web page for me to use.

The site also lets users follow rinks, so they can find out events at the rink or when pickup games are being organized.

“We just launched last Saturday and the response we have got so far has been pretty incredible,” said Yen.

gshaw@vancouversun.com