The WHL Arena Guide - Spokane Veterans Memorial Arena, Spokane Chiefs

First Visit: October 26, 2024
CHL Arena: 77
WHL Arena: 20

Spokane Veterans Memorial Arena opened in 1995, replacing a Spokane Coliseum that at that point was only forty years old. While the Coliseum undoubtedly could have soldiered on for many more years with proper maintenance, Spokane shot for the moon by doubling their effective capacity, closing a junior-sized old rink and building a new, huge one in the hopes of attracting major concerts, NCAA basketball subregionals, and other touring productions that had previously been passing the city by. This story is familiar to me in particular, because seven years later it was repeated in my hometown of London, where we closed a forty-year old arena and doubled our capacity. And just like back home, the new arena worked - Spokane became a common touring stop for travelling shows and productions and host for NCAA subregionals.

Spokane is the prototype for the three approximately 10,000-seat capacity, double-decker rinks in the CHL, with London and Everett being its descendents. It lies on the north side of the Spokane River from downtown, not far from the Expo '74 grounds, and it actually was built immediately adjacent to the old Coliseum, whose footprint sits just to the north. It's a tall, handsome building in brown brick and silver cladding, built on a hillside so that the north facade allows direct entry to the single concourse. If you walk down to the south side, you see the famous purple and green neon sign overlooking a small park, identifying this place as Spokane Arena.

A word of warning - parking is all either in adjacent lots and garages or on city streets. We parked on the street a little more than two hours before the end of paid parking for the night, figuring we'd top it up while in the game to make sure we got to the point of it being free. Despite there being nothing written on the meter itself or the parking app to indicate it, you can't top up once you're parked. Fortunately we were not ticketed, but still, don't make the same mistake we did!

If you enter Spokane Arena through the main entrance, a well-stocked team store greets you, then it's an immediate climb back up the stairs into the concourse. It's a single-concourse design, with portals leading into the lower bowl and stairs leading up to the upper level. The concourse is wide enough that the 6,500 strong crowd that we saw didn't bottleneck, and bathrooms didn't line up too badly, which is a nice plus. Moreover, Spokane is an early adopter at the junior level of grab-and-go stands and self-refilling soda fountains, so food and concession lines moved quite quickly.

The seating bowl itself was familar to me as a Knights fan - an oval-shaped lower bowl and a U-shaped upper bowl above it. The Arena is roughed in to expand to a full two tiers should demand ever warrant it, so the fourth end has a bit of a rough, unfinished feel to it, with corrugated metal roof cladding in place where more seating might someday go. The Chiefs' two WHL and Memorial Cup banners hang proud in that end, adjacent to the only video screen in the building. There's no centre scoreboard in Spokane, just a large screen in the one end, and game presentation does suffer a little for it. But I did love that there was a second purple and green neon Spokane Arena sign in the end, overlooking the video board.

That actually brings me to what might have been my favourite thing about Spokane Arena - it really hasn't changed much since 1995. All the original teal and purple signs still beckon you to your section, the original neon decor is still there, and according my local contacts, there really haven't been any major changes in the arena's entire thirty year history. But the Arena also feels clean and well-maintained, so keeping things radically 1995 in Spokane clearly is a choice someone has made, and to that person - props.

AV and game presentation is as good as you'd expect from a full-sized big city arena. The video board is well-used and the sound system is clear without being too loud. My only real pet peeve with it is that they play sound effects during play. It's not quite as egregious or annoying as in Wenatchee, but I'd still prefer my hockey to feel like hockey and not basketball.

The Chiefs' crowd was loud and into the game when I went, with a decent atmosphere despite it being early season. Moreover, the Chiefs still use one of the best goal songs in hockey. I was introduced to their habit of playing the Tarantella Napoletana at the 2008 Memorial Cup, and all these years later it was great to hear it again.

Spokane has a solid arena and is a great junior experience. By the time I got there as my 58th of the current 60, there was little in Spokane that I hadn't seen before, and nothing blew me away, but that's not a bad thing. There's something to be said for quiet, understated competence; doing all the little things well and nothing badly. It's a great experience overall and I enjoyed my visit there.