The WHL Arena Guide - Toyota Center, Tri-City Americans

First Visit: October 28, 2024
CHL Arena: 79
WHL Arena: 22

I completed the OHL in 2005, a mere three years after my first road game. I completed the QMJHL in 2022, seventeen years after my first Q game, although at least ten of those years were during a period of a junior hockey lull for me where I wasn't going to games nearly as often. Throughout that period, the idea of even going to WHL games, across an entire continent and with its attendant high airfare, was a pipe dream. I never really thought about going to every rink in the CHL - all 60 - because it seemed such an obviously unachievable goal. I'd like to see the Moon someday too, but I doubt I ever will!

But somehow, around the time I knocked off six WHL rinks during one epic road trip in the fall of 2022, the idea that I might someday get to every CHL rink started being a real possibility. And somehow, two years later, I did a four-game-in-four-night road trip through the WHL's U.S. Division, culminating in a Monday night game at the Toyota Center in Kennewick, Washington, during which I became the second person ever (and the first never to have been employed in sports or media) to be able to say it - I've done all 60.

Along with how personally meaningful this game was for me, it's worth noting that the Toyota Center is still a WHL rink, and I owe it to them to review them as I have with every other team. So: Kennewick is the largest of the Tri-Cities, a sprawling population centre that is part of the massive desert of central Washington, and a city that only exists in the form and size that it does because of the nearby Hanford Site, the home of the world's first full-scale nuclear reactor that was the top-secret laboratory that produced all the plutonium used in the Manhattan Project. You can now tour the famous B Reactor - and I did, the afternoon prior to a night game - marvelling at the ancient 1940's high technology that turned a group of small fruit-growing towns into a large city, or rather, three of them.

The Toyota Center, formerly the Tri-City Coliseum, dates back to the birth of the Americans franchise itself, opening in November 1988 after the team began the 1988-89 season on a two-month road trip. It sits in a parking lot in the middle of a neighbourhood of urban sprawl and big box stores, and from the outside, it looks like the 1980's rink that it is, with exposed dark glass and brown brickwork.

Once inside the arena, you find yourself in a narrow concourse that circles the building, with windows looking out to the parking lot, multiple concessions, and a team store so small that they were already limiting capacity five minutes after doors open when I arrived. There's also a VIP lounge above the main entrance that, amazingly, is open access for any ticket holder. I bought my puck at the team store, then stepped up, for the last time, to see a new CHL seating bowl for the first time.

For decades, the Coliseum had orange seats, but a few years ago the originals were all replaced by seats in red, blue, and grey, and the change is night and day. Between the seating and white paint in the rafters, not to mention team colours painted throughout the concourse, there is no doubting that this building belongs to the Tri-City Americans. It's such a small thing, but it goes a long way to making this feel like a hockey arena. And that's what this is - a hockey arena. The Coliseum wasn't designed for multiple sports, let alone basketball or boxing or trade shows. The sightlines for hockey here are tremendous.

There are a few minor issues with the game presentation in Tri-City. There is no centre scoreboard - not uncommon in the WHL's U.S. Division, but still not ideal for hockey. The team has video boards in each end, but they're not particularly well used, with limited graphic design and limited replays available. This isn't Wenatchee's amateur hour; Tri-City at least feels like their AV is done by professionals, but they could do a lot more with what they have. I also found the playing of sound effects annoying - again, they're not as egregious about it as Wenatchee or Spokane are, but any more than 'zero' is too much for me. Finally, I also noticed that the "kiss cam" did the old homophobic joke of showing two visiting players together at one point, plus the team played "Cotton-Eye Joe", which I was pretty sure we had agreed to stop doing as a society. It's not as bad as Seattle still playing the music of noted child sex offender Gary Glitter, but I still could have done without it.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the atmosphere. I didn't have high hopes for the atmosphere in Tri-City - I chose to attend a rare Monday night game against an opposite conference rival, when I knew the noise would likely be less than it could have been - but Tri-City's crowd, though small, was still loud and into the game. I find the atmosphere at American rinks is generally better than at Canadian ones anyway, but Tri-City blew me away considering the small Monday crowd. So, kudos to those fans.

I went to my first CHL game in the fall of 1987, and my first road game in the fall of 2002. Never in a million years did I ever think that someday I'd get to all sixty CHL rinks. But somehow, I kept plugging away, and by the fall of 2024 I'd run out of new places to explore. Tri-City was a worthy place to end, too; not the best arena I've ever visited, definitely nowhere near the worst, but unique, different, not a standard CHL clone rink. With the entire CHL finally done, I can move on to other things - I've got five NHL rinks left as of this writing - but it does feel, in a sense, like this Arena Guide project I started in September 2003 is finally, on some level, complete.

I'm not going anywhere, though. Teams will continue to move, cities will open new rinks, leagues will expand. I still have the same passion for junior hockey that I did back then, and I'll keep exploring the CHL and beyond as long as there are new frontiers to discover, for well into the future.

And thanks, Tri-City, for being such a terrific place to end. Hard as it is for me to believe even as I type this: I've done all 60.