Quinnipiac's new rink - breathtaking, way off campus

Stopped at Quinnipiac on our way to the Yale game (Q'pac is 10 miles northeast), saw the campus with our HS son, then saw the new $52 million athletic center. It's freakin' gorgeous: The TD Banknorth buiding is a vee, with a 3710 seat basketball arena on the left, 3247 seat hockey rink on the right, a lobby in between. That makes each seat cost $1,400. The seats are individual chairs, which would annoy the Lynah Faithful who couldn't dream of being comfortable watching a sport event. Looked good to me. Like Lynah you enter from the top concours ... that is wide enough for zillions of standees and with room for (at least on the hoops side) about 20 booster / donor / fatcat stand-up cocktail (style) tables.

However:

The rink is a mile or more off the main Mt. Carmel campus at the York Hill campus, which right now is the sports facility plus earth moving equipment and mounds of rubble, and in a couple years will be upperclass dorms for 1800 (school is 5500 undergrad). I'm not sure if Qpac just wants to move the whole campus to this new hilltop location eventually but there's a great view. It does mean you've got to shuttle-bus back and forth. And we gripe about new Cornell sports facilities each being located another 100, 200 yards farther away with each new one (wrestling center, etc.)

We drove up around 4 pm, three hours before gametime, and a Quinnipiac security officer in a knee-length black leather coat (no German accent) told us a) we couldn't go inside, b) we couldn't drive into the circular driveway at the front of the building (maybe we looked the car bomber type), but we could park for a couple minutes in the side parking area and look into the building. Nice way to treat a potential Q'pac student.

If I heard correctly from our tour guide, Quinnipiac students can get free sporting event tickets and hockey sells out. I think. She said, more or less a quote, "I'm going. It's supposed to be sold out. I'm really excited. Who are playing? Um. [Pause]. Maybe Clarkson, I think." Yep, Bobcats 3, #8 Clarkson 2.

This doesn't affect how well the hockey team does, but most Quinnipiac freshmen are housed in quads. Not two rooms, two beds, but one room, four beds. One late-night cellphone incoming call and you wake up four not two people. That may be why the Quinnipiac library is open 24 x 7.

New York Times January 2007 story on the rink (now freely available that the Gray Lady has given up charging for online): [www.nytimes.com]

I worked at Q this summer and stopped by the new rink one afternoon. There were some staffers standing around, but I had no problem walking right in (with a Cornell shirt, no less). It's a nice building....really well-lit, modern, clean. It looked like a comfortable place to watch a game. None of the in-your-face history that Lynah has, but that'll come over the years.

I also chatted with the Quinnipiac athletic director (or so I assumed) before the game at Lynah last weekend. He told me that they were considering charging money for student tickets, and asked me how much our tickets cost. He seemed shocked to learn that it cost $247 for a student season ticket package, but not-so-surprised to learn that the tickets hadn't sold out at that price.

Q seems to be going at this the right way -- building a nice facility, producing good teams, giving free tix to students. Cornell is the opposite -- fleecing students out of hundreds of dollars to see a mediocre team, looking for any excuse to throw them out of the rink, etc. From the article on Q's website about the win over Clarkson:

Rand Pecknold
"I think the crowd was a big part of the game. Our student section was great, as usual. I think it gave us great energy."

This is the right way to build enthusiasm for a hockey program.

Bill mentioned the rink's distance from the main campus. I don't see this as a big deal. Q is extremely commuter-friendly, with tons of parking right on campus. There's also a huge lot at the athletics facility, so I'm sure the travel wouldn't be an issue. (I'd assume that at least one of the four roommates in the quad would have a car available.) Here at Cornell, on the other hand, it is discouraged to have a car on-campus, so it's more of an issue to keep building further out.

Just as Q appears to be looking to programs like ours for guidance, maybe Cornell Athletics can learn some things from Quinnipiac, too.

ebilmes

Q seems to be going at this the right way -- producing good teams,

Cornell is the opposite -- fleecing students out of hundreds of dollars to see a mediocre team,

Maybe it relates to expectations, but I find this hard to reconcile with last week.

I've been to the TD Center twice now for hockey games and I have a couple of comments to add. Sure the arena is nice and new but the sight lines aren't the greatest in the lowest seats. The opposing team has to enter and exit at the west end of the ice, right through the middle of the student section. That has resulted in comments (no problem) as well as objects being thrown at/on opposing players (not so good).

Besides that, it's well lit (of course), has a great and sometimes overbearing sound system, and a nice scoreboard that for some reason isn't capable of showing replays. They also don't have cameras mounted for official replay, which seems kind of odd for a new arena. The arena gives you more of a AHL attitude than a college hockey air. Parking isn't an issue, but egress from the arena is an issue. It doesn't seem they've taught security there how to move people and cars.

I went to my first game at Lynah last year. As a Clarkson fan, the result was disappointing, but you can't beat the atmosphere.

Looked to me like Brown's replaced the lighting in Meehan. Makes a big difference.

Al DeFlorio
Looked to me like Brown's replaced the lighting in Meehan. Makes a big difference.

I totally agree.

Al DeFlorio
Looked to me like Brown's replaced the lighting in Meehan. Makes a big difference.

At the end of the day, though, you're still watching Brown. Personally, if I had to do that twice a weekend, I think I'd rather it be dim.