The WHL Arena Guide - Town Toyota Center, Wenatchee Wild

First Visit: October 25, 2024
CHL Arena: 76
WHL Arena: 19

While most new teams which join sports leagues in North America do so through either expansion or relocation, occasionally there is a third option - promotion. The Wenatchee Wild were founded in 2008 as an NAHL team, and moved into the BCHL in 2013. In 2023, when the Winnipeg Ice were unceremoniously forced out of Winnipeg, the only city in the entire WHL catchment area that was ready to take them on no questions asked was Wenatchee. But the only thing that moved to Wenatchee was the team's WHL history and roster. The Wild kept their identity, ownership group and staff, and after going to a Wenatchee Wild game in the fall of 2024, my biggest takeaway is that despite it being their second season after promotion, Wenatchee still feels like a BCHL team.

The Wenatchee Valley is a stunning, picturesque part of central Washington, and the city lies alongside the Columbia River surrounded on all sides by brown, desert mountains. The lush, verdant Pacific coast, this is not! The Town Toyota Center lies adjacent to the river, in a neighbourhood cut off from the rest of the city by a rail line. As we found out postgame, sometimes trains park across the rail line, which means that getting out of the area can occasionally be difficult as you search for a rail underpass!

The arena itself is a reasonably attractive red brick building with a community ice pad included as part of the complex. There's a relatively small parking lot, but there's also far more parking available on gravel lots across the street, and happily, it's free. Security checkpoints were set up outside for the game I went to in October, and one hopes that's not the case in the dead of winter!

The arena itself is a design perhaps most reminiscent of the CAA Centre in Brampton. A very wide, U-shaped concourse lies at ground level under the seats, and despite the Wild playing in the rink since its opening in 2008, there's shockingly little in the way of character or personality. The Wild's BCHL championship trophy is on display, but otherwise the entire thing is clad in bare neutral colours. In one corner of the concourse the team have set up a Kids Zone with a bouncy castle, and in the other the Wild have a souvenir kiosk - not a permanent team store, surprisingly - and that's about it.

The bowl is accessed by stairs up into the rink itself. It's a U-shaped bowl of dark green seats, with a full suite level above and ribbon boards above that. A tiny press box sits in the rafters, and there is no centre score clock, only a big display board in the far end where there are no seats. The bare bones of the rink, at least, are solid. Views are pretty close to universally good, and the angle of the seating is good for hockey sightlines. The lighting was maybe a bit spotty and underpowered, but not so much as to make anything difficult to see.

The Wild also have all their banners from their entire NAHL and BCHL days on display, as well as every banner ever earned by the Ice franchise in Kootenay and Winnipeg. I am totally on board with a team showing off their history, and so for this, at least, the Wild get credit.

My biggest criticism of Wenatchee, and the biggest takeaway from the experience, is that the AV production is shockingly amateurish and not up to the standard of the CHL. For a start, our seats were in the end (the bottom of the U), and that entire bank of speakers weren't working. No one in our end could hear arena announcements, and we had to open up the official WHL gamesheet online just to figure out what was going on.

The scoreboard graphics package, such as it was, included several elements that were quite obviously just mocked up in PowerPoint rather than done by a professional graphic designer. As far as the actual graphics themselves go, there was absolutely nothing clever, local, or original going on. They did the Bruce Dickinson SNL cowbell clip and the gopher singing like Freddie Mercury clip... and then they repeated, and then they did them again. The graphics look and feel like someone went on Youtube, searched "hockey scoreboard clips", and made a very short, very predictable playlist. I'm not expecting NHL quality at the junior level, but a "No Repeat Game Day" shouldn't be too much to ask, shouldn't it?

For the third period, we changed seats into a section that could actually hear the announcer, and... we shouldn't have bothered. The PA announcer has serious "college radio DJ" vibes, definitely not with the air of a seasoned professional. As a former college radio DJ myself, I'm not immune to the amateur charms of such a style, but also, I've never thought I had the chops to announce a hockey game. Moreover, Wenatchee's announcer kept exhorting the crowd to make noise, etc. during play. The Wild also play the Ric Flair "woo" noise every single time the team clears the zone on a PK, all game long. The basketballification of hockey is something that must be resisted at all costs, and Wenatchee, unfortunately, is one of the worst offenders I've yet encountered.

The last loose end that didn't fit elsewhere into this writeup, but must be mentioned about Wenatchee's game experience, is theatrical smoke. The team did a laser show pregame which required pumping in a Laser Quest-esque amount of fog, but it didn't stop there. Throughout the game, when the team scored a goal, or multiple other times at random, the fog guy pumped out a bunch more into the arena. I can't say this one specifically annoyed me, but it is very, very weird, particularly as someone who grew up going to games at an old arena, where, on warm days the fog could be a problem that occasionally required a stoppage in order to skate around and make it dissipate!

Finally, one really positive thing you can say about Wenatchee is that the fan support is there. The atmosphere in the building was excellent and the fans show up in good numbers. Much like my criticism of Moose Jaw, everything that makes Wenatchee fall short as a CHL experience is fixable. Cheaping out on AV isn't nearly as difficult to fix as bad sightlines or too low of a capacity or apathetic fans. In some ways, it's a pity that the team kept their entire BCHL staff when they moved the Winnipeg Ice here in 2023, because it really feels like they needed someone experienced in high-level gameday operations to introduce the existing team to a CHL level of production. What Wenatchee feels like, for me, is a BCHL team that hasn't quite figured out that they're in the Big Time of junior hockey now. I very much hope that they figure it out over the coming seasons.