Ideas for a new arena for the Boston women's hockey team?

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ritchiew

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For those not following, the PWHL recently finished its first season, and it's been by far the best attempt at starting a professional women's hockey league. Boston made it to the finals, but lost in Game 5 (in a best of five series). Everything about the season was a lot of fun, and looked like a big success for the league.

A problem for Boston is they were playing at the Tsongas Center at UMass Lowell. That arena is great, but far from Boston. I went for one regular season game and the ~6000 seats were probably more than half full. Some regular season games sold out. During the playoffs they were all sold out. That Game 5 sold out in something like 15 minutes, and tickets were being resold for thousands. The other original six teams played at a weird mix of urban/suburban professional/minor league arenas. Minnesota was the only team to just use the local NHL arena and I think they were pretty regularly selling out those 20,000 seats.

With all that in mind, any ideas 1) Why they ended up playing in Lowell? 2) What requirements they might have (I'm guessing >5000 seats and modern TV production facilities are key)? and 3) What other facilities might fit those requirements so they could play closer to the city? I was kind of surprised they couldn't work it out to play at BU, BC, Harvard, or NEU. I'm not sure what else might be in the area that could potentially host this.

One day they'll be playing at the Garden. Until then, I'm just hoping they're closer to rapid transit.
 
This is just a guess, but I suspect they didn't have time to secure a spot in the schedule of the size appropriate arenas in Boston. The four Beanpot schools are probably the best option, and given the proof of concept plus advance scheduling timeline, they can probably get at least some combination of those skating surfaces, if not a single "home" arena to work with. BU also has Walter Brown Arena, which is smaller than Agannis but might provide some additional scheduling flexibility. One thing is certain, which is that for the team to thrive, they need to be much closer to Boston, like no further away than Newton.
 
The only reason I heard about PWHL this year is because they got some notoriety in the younger crowd in Lowell, which I still have 1 or 2 connections with. I'm sure if it was closer to Boston it'd be a lot more popular..

This might have some slight bias as I grew up next to Lowell and then lived in Lowell for undergrad, but the Tsongas Center feels like much more of a community asset for Lowell and the surrounding towns in addition to an asset for UMass, likely drawing in more diverse attendance, than say the Agganis for example, which feels more specific to BU (even though plenty of concerts and public events are held there).

It's a shame the New Balance/Warriors Arena only seats 500.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Based on what I'm told repeatedly on this board, architecturally preserving an ugly-ass supertall smokestack or GTFO.
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Yes, it was that conversation that reminded me that Boston has another sports team playing far outside the city limits. Fortunately for everyone here, I can't think of a way women's hockey could be blocked by smokestack preservation. Crisis averted.

stefal said:
It's a shame the New Balance/Warriors Arena only seats 500.
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For sure. The last women's hockey team from the now defunct PHF played there. It was close, so I went to more games, but way too small. It was a lot more fun watching hockey with a few thousand screaming fans in Tsongas.
 
It's quite possible that they're better off in Lowell for the time being, until the league is financially stable. They're a bigger fish in Lowell and would probably have an easier time creating ties within the community there than in Boston.
 
The team averaged ~3,750 per game during the regular season, and a little over 4,500 for the playoffs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023–24_PWHL_season#Attendance). More than respectable for a new league! So you'd be looking at something like a 5-6,000 seat place as a sustainable venue with some room for growth. I don't think the league is in a place right now to be building venues, though, so they need to continue to use existing spaces. Agganis would be ideal, however I'm not sure BU (or any of the other local Hockey East or ECAC schools) is as willing to share their rink as UML is. The River Hawks shared Tsongas with an AHL team for over a decade, so they're much more comfortable with such agreements. I guess Walter Brown would be more available, but it's both too small and also a total hole. Tsongas hits that sweet spot and is just local enough to make the Boston moniker work.
 
Walter brown would be great but I was told that the “media facilities” are subpar. Which I find funny, I mean you go to a basketball game and there’s 20 guys playing on their laptops in court side seats — is that what we want? My vision for the pwhl would be it would be a sport that people go to and watch in person (or stream) not a playground for journalists and media types. You could even put together a college style pep band in the barns and make it a real experience.
 
The ultimate goal is to have the women's sports on par with the men's leagues in both attendance and media coverage, so it's in their best interests to have good press facilities to drive that. I think that's also where the lack of other amenities at Walter Brown start to play in - it doesn't have video or ribbon boards like Tsongas and Agganis do, and that makes the presentation seem distinctly minor league, regardless of how full and loud the place is.
 
Longfellow said:
Walter brown would be great but I was told that the “media facilities” are subpar. Which I find funny, I mean you go to a basketball game and there’s 20 guys playing on their laptops in court side seats — is that what we want? My vision for the pwhl would be it would be a sport that people go to and watch in person (or stream) not a playground for journalists and media types. You could even put together a college style pep band in the barns and make it a real experience.
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The media facilities isn't really about having space for sports journalists to sit around. It's having the space to set up and take down a whole television studio each game. It's mostly back-of-house stuff, so it's hard to see exactly what's going on, but it's likely a couple dozen people on the crew and millions of dollars worth of tv equipment. The arena probably has to be wired to feed everything into production and transmission trucks outside. And it would have to have the power capacity to run a tv studio on top of everything else. I'm just guessing on the specifics, but there are a lot of logistics that go into making a quality sports broadcast, and any potential arena needs to accommodate that. And I wouldn't be surprised if Walter Brown just isn't up to snuff.

From what I've read, the PWHL really focused on high production value broadcasts, and it seems to have paid off. The broadcasts and streams were really, really good (even if it was short of NHL-quality production). That helps grow the fan base.

I came across this article describing some of PWHL broadcast setup, which shows some of the scale of what they're doing. One interesting thing is even some of the arenas they used this season were a bit underequipped for the kind of broadcast quality they were trying to get.
Because of scheduling, most of the PWHL teams will play home games at multiple arenas this year. They run the gamut from NHL-level venues UBS Arena on Long Island and Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul to minor-league and college-hockey buildings Verdun Auditorium in Montreal and Tsongas Center in Boston.

“We are working with some venues that weren’t necessarily teed up for the type of operation that we’re bringing in — from not only a broadcast perspective but also a game-operations perspective,” says Penny. “A lot of this was learning on the fly; if something doesn’t work out for one game, we immediately figure out [how] to make sure we can bring that to life for the next game. And that will continue all season long.”
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I can definitely at least attest to the space constraints of Wally b. There’s a whole basketball court and dorm on top of it.
 
Walter Brown is slated for renovations and Matthews is slated for demolition. That displaces BU women's to Agganis and NU men's and NU women's to an undisclosed location for a few years. Doesn't leave much room for PWHL Boston, it seems, on the college front.
 
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