When news broke in August that the University of Washington was officially joining the University of Oregon in a monumental move from the Pac 12 to the Big 10 conference, local hockey fans—Sound Of Hockey included—began speculating if this could mean an expansion of Division I college hockey to the West Coast.

After all, the Big 10 sponsors a men’s hockey conference made up of seven teams: Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Penn State, and Wisconsin. Wouldn’t it make sense for the Big 10 and for college hockey to add at least one team in this region, and perhaps multiple?

“I’m confident that Washington, Oregon, UCLA, Utah, Texas, Georgia… I’m confident they would all be successful,” said Mike Snee, executive director of College Hockey, Inc., an organization focused on promoting and growing NCAA Division I men’s and women’s hockey. “It’s just a matter of, would they do it?”

‘Would they do it?’ is certainly a big question for UW, but so too are ‘Could they do it?’ and ‘Should they do it?’ Does UW have the means to add varsity hockey to its repertoire, and if it did, how successful would it be?

Could they do it?

Sound Of Hockey spoke with UW director of athletics, Troy Dannen, to learn about the feasibility of Husky hockey one day transforming from a club sport into a school-sponsored D-I program. He made it clear there would be major hurdles for a men’s or women’s team to be added and that right now, it really isn’t on the roadmap for the university.

“There’s three things,” Dannen said. “One, there’s the equity piece.” Dannen explained that to comply with Title IX, 55 percent of new opportunities have to be given to female students, because 55 percent of UW is female. So, if they wanted to specifically add men’s hockey, that would also mean they would have to add either women’s hockey or a different female sport.

“If I’m adding men’s hockey, I’m certainly at least adding women’s hockey, so it’s a much broader undertaking to think about expansion, particularly on the male side, than just, ‘Hey, there’s other schools of the Big 10 that do it.’”

Worth noting, the Big 10 does not sponsor women’s hockey. Only four Big 10 schools have varsity women’s hockey programs, and Minnesota, Ohio State, and Wisconsin play in the Midwest-centric Western Collegiate Hockey Association (WCHA), while Penn State plays in College Hockey America (CHA).

Dannen continued his list of hurdles that would need to be overcome. “Two, there’s just the finance piece, the cost of doing that business, and if there’s not an automatic growth on the revenue side to offset those expenses, then where are we taking the costs away from? What sport or what program [do we cut from] in order to fund a new sport?

“So, that’s two, and three is obviously infrastructure. It doesn’t matter whether it’s swimming, hockey, lacrosse, there needs to be practice and competition facilities. And so, where are those and what are the costs of those? It’s a pretty massive undertaking to decide that you want to add a sport when you think about all those factors.”

Arena would be largest hurdle

That last piece Dannen mentioned is especially daunting. Where would a D-I men’s and/or women’s team play?

UW’s club hockey teams, which compete in the American Collegiate Hockey Association (ACHA), practice and play their home games at Kraken Community Iceplex, the practice facility and corporate headquarters for the Seattle Kraken. It’s an outstanding facility for the ACHA, but it is not fit for D-I hockey, nor is Climate Pledge Arena, which seats 17,151 fans, way too big for the college game. Meanwhile, Angel of the Winds Arena and accesso ShoWare Center—the respective homes of the Western Hockey League’s Everett Silvertips and Seattle Thunderbirds—are the right sizes for D-I hockey but are simply too far from campus.

“You’re in a major metropolitan area with tons of entertainment options,” Snee said. “This would need to be just intimately connected to the school on campus or across the street from the campus, and it would need to be their building.”

Unfortunately for local college hockey fans, new arenas don’t come cheap. Augustana University in Sioux Falls, S.D., recently launched a D-I men’s program and joined the Central Collegiate Hockey Association (CCHA). It opened sparkling new 3,000-seat Midco Arena on Jan. 26, which came with a price tag somewhere in the $65 to $80 million range, according to Snee. And that’s in Sioux Falls, where real estate and building costs are significantly lower than in Seattle.  

Snee also estimated that operating a men’s hockey program costs $4-5 million annually, so in total, he approximated that a new men’s program for UW would require a pot of about $160 million.

Should they do it?

That rough $160 million estimate is a big chunk of change that UW certainly won’t field without a few massive unforeseen gifts from deep-pocketed donors. Such gifts have been catalysts for new programs popping up in several different areas of the country, and that is what would need to happen at Washington.

At Penn State, Kim and Terry Pegula—owners of the Buffalo Bills and Sabres—gave what Snee said was “pretty close to $100 million” to get men’s and women’s programs off the ground and to build a hockey-specific arena. Augustana was funded largely by donations from banking and healthcare magnate T. Denny Sanford, and Arizona State University received a gift from an anonymous donor for $38 million and a second large gift from the Mullett family. Those gifts led to the elevation of ASU’s men’s team from the ACHA to NCAA D-I in 2015, and Mullett Arena, also the temporary home of the Arizona Coyotes, opened in 2022 as part of the package.

Snee surmised that ASU, which happens to be the alma matter of Kraken netminder Joey Daccord, is the best comparable for the University of Washington.

“Both [Seattle and Tempe, Ariz.] are experiencing relatively rapid hockey participation growth, especially Seattle in the state of Washington, for understandable reasons,” Snee said. “But it’s not only having an NHL team, but having that NHL team absolutely crush it when it comes to getting kids involved in hockey and marketing their team in the way they’re marketing it.”

Snee said it’s obvious ASU’s move to D-I hockey has been a smashing success and believes UW would have a similar response from the local community.

“You can see how well Arizona State’s working, regardless of how you want to measure it,” Snee said. “On the ice, they are very successful. Off the ice, tickets do very well. If you ever walk around campus down there, there are tons of people wearing jerseys. If you go to their road games, whether it’s in Boston, Minnesota, Michigan, there are a lot of alumni living in those areas, attending those games.”

Kraken connections to college hockey

Funding aside, could Washington replicate ASU’s success? Daccord, who flourished as a Sun Devil and eventually became the first ASU alumnus to play in the NHL, certainly thinks so.

“I think the blueprint is definitely there,” Daccord said. “And I think the desire for hockey is there. So I think it would absolutely do well and succeed, and having seen how well it took off at Arizona State firsthand [from inception] to now is incredible. I think that’s a perfect comparable, and I think that they absolutely could do the same thing if they wanted to.”

The 27-year-old goaltender said the success of the ASU program required vast amounts of money, but also a steadfast commitment from the school’s leadership.

“The athletic department, the coaching staff, everyone involved with the program was so committed to making it happen,” Daccord recalled. “And it was like, ‘Hey, we’re 100 percent doing this. We’re committed to this. We’re not just going to go in with one foot in and one foot out and hope it works.’ They were like, ‘Hey, we’re making this work.’”

Another Kraken connection with deep ties to college hockey is head coach Dave Hakstol, who played three seasons at the University of North Dakota from 1989 to 1992 and was the men’s team’s head coach from 2004 to 2015 before making the jump to the NHL. He sees college hockey developing and thinks expansion to the West Coast could be the sport’s “next step.”

“If you look at the number of new college hockey buildings over the last five years, for me that points to the investment in the college hockey game that’s continuing to grow,” Hakstol said. “The number of new programs that have joined the Division I ranks over the past five years, as well as the number of schools that are looking at the feasibility of it, I believe, is continuing to grow… It’s going to continue to grow, and there’s a very strong push from within, for the growth of the game, and I believe that matches the number of available players to play college hockey.”

Hakstol also recognized the challenges that Dannen pointed out, but he too believes it could work in the market.

“No matter what college campus you go to, there’s financial challenges with facilities, equity with men’s and women’s sports, and the expense of adding new programs. But what a campus and what a site and what a great spot it would be for college hockey. Do I believe that? Yeah, absolutely.”

Would they do it?

With the arrival of the Kraken, hockey has been growing by leaps and bounds in the Pacific Northwest. Factor in the collapse of the Pac 12 and this tectonic shift in the college sports landscape, and D-I college hockey does suddenly make some sense. Schools like UW have been playing in a conference that did not offer college hockey, so if they had introduced the sport in the past, they would have been on an island both geographically and—potentially—in terms of finding regular competition. So adding the sport likely wouldn’t have worked before.

But just because there might be augmented interest from the local market and a ready-made schedule of in-conference opponents does not mean any conversations of substance are happening around adding varsity hockey.

“I would just say, no,” Dannen said. “I’ve only been here four months, but at least serious conversations, no.”

Dannen, the former director of athletics at Tulane University who also calls himself a big hockey fan, has been to several Seattle Kraken games since taking the AD role at the University of Washington in October. He is familiar with how the game is growing in the region, but he said that aside from the three other roadblocks he pointed out—equity, financing, and infrastructure—there is also a pressing issue that needs to be resolved before any school would consider adding any new sports, let alone an extremely expensive sport like hockey.

The introduction of name, image, and likeness (NIL) rules that allow student athletes to get legally paid has injected some level of chaos into college athletics. Dannen said the addition of new sports at Washington is unlikely until things stabilize on that front.

“There’s been anecdotal conversations about hockey, wrestling, lacrosse, sports that— once we decided to go to the Big 10, people look and see what the other Big 10 schools are doing,” Dannen said. “I would tell you in general, right now, given the flux in college athletics, given that we don’t know where we’re going to end up with— whether it’s revenue sharing or employment of student athletes, I think it’s farfetched for anyone to have expansion on the radar screen until we really figure out what our long-term model is going to look like.”

No, they wouldn’t

Snee confirmed that while other confidential schools have launched feasibility studies with College Hockey, Inc., there has been no indication to his organization (which is typically looped in on these types of conversations) that the University of Washington has any interest at this time in adding hockey on the men’s or women’s side.

AD Dannen even indicated that wrestling is a more likely add than hockey, because of its lower barriers to entry and because it is currently one of the fastest-growing women’s sports. And even though hockey is a revenue-generating sport, Dannen called it “incremental revenue” and said that only football and (to a degree) men’s basketball are self-sufficient in terms of their abilities to bring in enough dollars to fund themselves.

So, although the ‘Could they?’ and ‘Should they?’ questions can be answered affirmatively by some parties, the ‘Would they?’ question gets a resounding negative response from the director of athletics at UW.

Of course, if a deep-pocketed donor called tomorrow and offered a nine-figure gift to get hockey off the ground, that could change the conversation.

Header photo courtesy Cheyenne Mingo (@cheyennemingo_photography), University of Washington.