Throughout their 100-plus years of organized hockey, St. Thomas has played and won a lot of games. Until they were elevated from Division III to Division I in 2021, the Tommies had the most wins of any program in Division III (1,164 in 96 seasons). They won 34 conference titles at that level, and made 17 NCAA tournament appearances. Twice they were the national runners up. It was a solid resume by any standards. But they never had a permanent on-campus home. Until now.
When the Tommies hockey programs host Providence with a pair of doubleheaders this weekend at the brand-new, $175 million Lee & Penny Anderson Arena, it will be the first time since at least World War II that the men’s team will play on campus indoors in St. Paul (and the first time the women’s team will ever play at home).
That’s a milestone that’s not lost on head coach Rico Blasi.
“You know, in hockey, we’ve never had a home on campus. And that’s huge. I mean, just think about that, we’ve had hockey for over 100 years,” Blasi said. “I think I saw a picture on campus where there was an outdoor game, and I think it might have been after World War Two. But other than that, it’s been at the St. Paul Fairgrounds, it’s been at Mendota, it’s been other places, you name it but it has never been on campus.”
In the past the Tommies played at numerous places around the Twin Cities, including the “Cow Palace” in South St. Paul, Aldrich Arena in Maplewood, St. Paul Academy, and the Coliseum Ice Arena at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds. When the women’s hockey program started in 1999, their home was the Parade Ice Garden in Minneapolis. Since 2003, both men’s and women’s teams have played at the Saint Thomas Ice Arena in suburban Mendota Heights–a facility that is a seven mile drive from the Tommies’ St. Paul campus and owned by Saint Thomas Academy. And while the Saint Thomas Ice Arena is nice for a high school rink, it is just that–a high school rink.
“The Academy is great, but it’s good to finally get out of that place and kind of let the high school team have their turf back,” Tommies men’s captain Lucas Wahlin said. “The new arena on campus is wonderful. My expectations were high, and it beat my expectations. I was a little bit more fortunate to get in there and kind of see while it was getting built, and once I kind of saw the final product of when it was actually fully built, when we moved in, I was just in shock. I didn’t know what to say.”
The new, multipurpose arena is located right in the middle of the St. Thomas campus in the city’s Macalester-Groveland neighborhood. It will be the home for both hockey programs as well as the Tommies’ men’s and women’s basketball programs. The seating capacity will be 4,000 for hockey and 5,300 for basketball, but perhaps more importantly from a logistics standpoint is that none of the four teams will ever have to fight for ice (or court) time. There is a practice ice sheet as well as two separate basketball practice courts. Each of the four programs have their own office spaces, locker rooms and team lounge and meeting rooms.
“For those people that know St. Thomas, there’s really one way of doing it, and that’s pretty much high end,” Blasi said. “So the details that we’ve tried to think of in the design phase, and, just even adding some things in the construction phase, from little logos to, an Instagram wall, to the donor wall, to just the way everything is positioned, it was very well thought out and well done.”
Blasi, who has been St. Thomas’ coach since their move to Division I in 2021, was the head coach at Miami from 1999-2019 and helped oversee the design of the Redhawks’ Goggin Ice Center when he was there. He said that he and the other coaching staffs had input into the process at St. Thomas as well.
“I think [Phil Esten, St. Thomas athletic director] wanted to make sure that the coaches were involved. So we were involved in helping out with our own areas for sure. When we met for the first month or whatever we were designing it, they got everybody’s feedback on just the way it was going to look, and the lay of the land. I don’t want to say we were heavily involved, but involved for sure.”
Returning to campus a huge boost
The state-of-the-art amenities will be nice, but the Tommies seem more excited about one thing in particular: Playing in front of a home crowd that’s actually at home.
Wahlin described how before, when they were in the suburbs, he would have to pack four or five freshmen in his car every day to make the 15 minute drive. Players didn’t really have a place to hang out together, and they barely ever saw athletes from other sports teams.
“But now that we’re at the new arena, it’s like we won’t even be practicing and we got guys hanging out in the lounge, doing homework in there, and that culture that we want to build of guys being together 24/7, and it’s been there.”
When the arena was still in the planning stages, St. Thomas administrators looked at a couple different spots in St. Paul–both on and off campus–before finally deciding to build right in the heart of campus.
Athletic director Esten said the move back to campus made sense as a way to grow the community.
“To make this work on campus, it just made all the sense in the world, because it’s going to be more accessible to our student athletes on a daily basis, and our students to come support on a game night basis. It does bring our alumni back to campus, rather than to some other part of the community,” Esten said. “It creates a cool little quad on our South Campus that didn’t exist before, with one of the new science buildings and some other academic spaces down there. And it looks like it just integrates to campus really, really well. It looks like every other building on campus with the stone.”
It also makes financial sense–donors may be even more willing to give money now that there are more events on campus.
“Donors understood how important it was to be a campus, and once we finally locked into it, donors understood the vibrancy that this would bring to campus, the energy it would bring to campus. So donors really lean into this on campus location, which helped to move it along more quickly,” Esten said.
Being on campus close to everything should also get the student body and wider community more excited for the hockey program–which is especially important as they prepare to enter the NCHC next season. The Tommies were picked by the CCHA media to win the McNaughton Cup this season and will be eligible for the NCAA tournament for the first time.
“I think it will bring a lot of new student body to our games. I know it was really difficult for some student fan base to get out to Mendota because they couldn’t get rides, or they wanted to have drinks and Uber or whatever, and all those kind of problems kind of taper down on on the drive to Mendota, but now you can walk across the street and still pre game in the parking lot,” Wahlin said. “That student fan base is what I’m really looking forward to. This year, for the first time, I’ll be in class, and I’ll have somebody come up to me and just say, ‘Hey, I can’t wait to get in that student section, be banging on the glass and stuff like that.’ So I can feel the excitement on campus.”
The Tommies men’s team enters the weekend game with a 2-3 record and are coming off a road split at Air Force. The women are 6-2 after a road split with St. Cloud State.
“You never get to play the first time twice, and we’ve gotta do our job and be ready,” Blasi said. “A lot of people have, quite literally, put their blood and sweat into this building. And so it becomes much more than just a game, even though, for us as a team, we’ve got to focus on that. It became a special moment in St Thomas history, especially athletically, but university-wide, because there’s a lot of people that have sacrificed a lot for our team and our teams that are here to to be in this building.”