College hockey rinks aren’t the same anymore.
They aren’t the old barns built during the 1970s.
They’re more antiseptic and devoid of character than the old buildings lacking heat or modern comfort, but they represent the soul and fabric stitched by generations of slap shots and millions of body checks. Even ones owned by corporations captured the no-frills of on-campus homes with wooden ceilings and austere bench seating.
Yet if you asked me – and nobody really did – those older arenas represent the best traditions of hockey’s more spartan-like days. They soaked and oozed the blood and sweat of players who skated hours in eras without opulent team rooms or electronic film studies. They were dirtier and dingier, but they were home to memorable characters at a time before the circus atmospheres of the modern day.
They remain imprinted on those of us who watched the game within their not-so-cozy confines, but they’re often remembered more for their nostalgia than anything else. Almost all of them are obsolete by modern college hockey standards, and they’re often replaced by bigger arenas with required trappings for the modern skater.
Old places are dying off, and even in ECAC, the conversation around a league with five of the oldest arenas in college hockey is unavoidable after Union College announced its intention to leave the 50-year-old Frank L. Messa Rink at Achilles Center after the 2024-25 season to occupy the new, 2,200-seat arena being built at the Mohawk Harbor Events Center.
“For me, my [college] career ended at that rink,” commissioner Doug Christiansen told Ken Schott of the Daily Gazette during the ECAC preseason conference call. “So I know a lot of people will be coming back through, [and] depending on how old they are, as they come back through that rink, they’re going to have great memories. But I will also say that having seen where the new building is going to be and seeing where it stands now, there’s a lot of things to look forward to.
“A new building in our league is great, and it’s obviously somewhere that everybody is going to look forward to playing in the future.”
ECAC is the home of college hockey’s most historic buildings, but Messa and Union in general illustrate the spirit and rhythm associated with growing a program from humble roots. Its grand reopening in 1975 started at the Division II level after Ned Harkness returned to the Capital District following a disastrous stint with the Detroit Red Wings, but the building’s first official game as the Achilles Center in December of that year came when the then-Dutchmen defeated Salem State with a 9-6 victory.
Ten years later, battles against RIT dotted six different postseason matchups across three different seasons, during which the burgeoning rivalry with the Tigers parried the ECAC West championship alongside the national title during Division II’s collapsing years in the mid-1980s. Having moved to Division III, Union hosted the 1985 championship round before Army’s departure from the Division I ECAC conference opened a void filled in 1991 by Bruce Delventhal’s Dutchmen.
“When they announced they were going to Division I, then-President Roger Hall said that they were not going to treat the program any differently, and it was going to be treated like all the other program on Union’s campus, which were all Division III,” noted Schott. “So that meant no scholarships and no help whatsoever, which is why it was amazing when Union made the postseason during its third year of Division I hockey. They took RPI to three games in the quarterfinals, but it wasn’t until Nate [Leaman] came in, having seen what Shawn Walsh did at Maine and what Mark Mazzoleni did at Harvard without scholarships that they started developing.”
Through it all, the Achilles Center remained a constant presence. In 1992, a 3-2 win over Vermont offered the first-ever home victory as a Division I team before the 1993-94 team sealed its aforementioned playoff berth with a 5-1-1 record in its last seven home games. Three years later, the 1996-97 team went 12-3-2 was undefeated after a mid-December loss to Harvard, after which the 2000-01 team went 10-5-2 opposite a 2-13-1 record in road games.
That level of periodic success proved to Union that the team could consistently compete, and a $1.5 million renovation gift from alumnus Frank L. Messa renamed the arena after its benefactor for the 2003-04 season. Handed a new lease and a new head coach in Leaman, a steady build finally brought a home playoff series to its ice sheet in 2004 before the upward trajectory and breakthrough handed Union its first-ever first-round bye in 2008. A first-time trip to the conference semifinals followed, and the first regular-season championship in 2011 dangled the first-of-its-kind national tournament banner from its rafters before Rick Bennett brought the team to the Frozen Four ahead of its national championship win in 2014.
“Nate had to educate the Union staff and faculty of what it took to be committed to Division I hockey,” Schott remarked, “and slowly but surely, they were able to get more help in the financial aid department. They were able to get more players, and they were able to start building them and helping them because they were treated like a Division I program.”
That level of investment finally outgrew the rink in the aftermath of college hockey’s exploding construction. Like so many other buildings throughout the landscape, an arena built in the 1970s failed to capture the infrastructure of the shiny, more glittery buildings. Since 2010, renovations across the entire ECAC landscape produced improvements at nearly every other school, with Cornell separately announcing construction of a new indoor sports facility after renovating Lynah Rink in the mid-2000s.
For its part, Union understood that it couldn’t stand still, but the exploration of a new building at the Mohawk Harbor facility created an offer capable of changing the program’s overall face after the NCAA voted to allow the Division III school to, like RIT, offer scholarships for its Division I hockey programs. Three options, according to university president David Harris, existed: build an on-campus facility, renovate the new building, or lease the new events center located just beyond the college’s geographic footprint.
“The Mohawk Harbor option provides us the best option,” he wrote in a 2022 letter to the campus community, “and because expenses are shared with other parties, it is also the most cost-effective option.”
Just like that – and with two years of efforts to ensure construction – the first new ECAC hockey arena since Colgate opened the Class of 1965 Arena in 2016 put its shovel into the ground. Like the Raiders’ exit from Starr Rink, an old friend serving a community for decades was left without a known future, and another relic from an older age of college hockey was lost to the history books.
In so many ways, a new arena benefits a community and an area, and the greater Schenectady area is teeming with open economic possibilities after reinventing itself over the past two decades. Yet to lose its older identity is, in a way, to say goodbye once more to a time when college hockey played its games along the boards and dashers of buildings with a wooden roof and dark, no-back stands. The old days are gone, even as opportunity peeks its eyes around the corner.
