Walking into any arena in college hockey produces a certain number of expectations.
A sport built around its emotion and drama now has buildings capable of manufacturing the dopamine levels required for delirious fans wanting to cheer their teams to victory, and the climate of a building is often artificially produced through lights or video presentations.
It’s a miniature version of an arena in the National Hockey League, and the changing landscape geared itself towards welcoming fans through a type of sensory overload.
The days of simply watching a game at a rink are increasingly obsolete, and even the oldest buildings in college hockey are increasingly renovating their facilities to include amenities catered at a fan’s comfort. The true rink built around sightlines and the game don’t exist, but this weekend, Princeton will step into its time machine and celebrate Hobey Baker Rink’s centennial with a “Hobey at 100” event illustrating exactly how age and experience continues to make it one of the most celebrated barns in college hockey.
“It’s an honor to be behind the bench during games and on the ice working with our gifted student-athletes,” said Ron Fogarty, the head coach of the Tigers’ men’s program. “Walking in through the old wooden doors and knowing that there’s 100 years of history is special. There are a lot of great coaches and great players who came before us, and it’s just a unique, historic facility. It’s different from the arenas that are being built, and it’s still one of those old-fashioned rinks.”
Baker Rink is a hockey purist’s dream come true and a central sculpture dating back to the earliest days of college hockey. It opened in 1923 and remains the longest continuous home for a university’s hockey program, and while it’s 12 years younger than Northeastern’s Matthews Arena and the same age as Michigan’s Yost Ice Arena, neither the Huskies nor the Wolverines populated their buildings until after the Tigers moved into their new home. In Michigan’s case, the building has a history dating back to 1923, but it was primarily a basketball arena before it was converted into a hockey rink in the 1970s.
Princeton’s home is old, but it’s nothing one of the five oldest college hockey programs ever has to apologize for. Its central location is unique among the residential colleges, and the amenities within the building echo an older time when fishbowl fans howled at opposing goalies. A lower seating bowl with just five rows situates fans right on top of the glass, and the balcony hanging over goalies harkens back to an era when construction needed to positioned fans into the action.
“When you step into Baker Rink, you can’t help but live it,” said Princeton women’s hockey coach Cara Morey. “You walk in and underneath, it’s completely renovated. There are beautiful leather chairs and video boards and everything you can imagine, but when you step out on the ice, you look at this building that’s been here before you and that’s going to stand a lot longer than you. You can’t help but realize what we say when we say that you’re a part of something bigger than yourself. You look around and see Olympians and NHL players in the windows, and there are stone walls that were built 100 years ago with these wooden rafters.
“It’s humbling because you automatically become part of that story.”
It’s a transformative tale akin to games at Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, and not even a loud sound system can shake ghosts from previous eras. A fan with blurred vision can feel transported into a previous era when Hobey Baker skated for the Tigers and helped produce Intercollegiate Championship teams before enlisting into the United States Army in World War I. The old Quadrangular League and the Pentagonal League played around World War II, and Princeton helped start ECAC at a time when college hockey began reforming its own identity.
The teams that skated for Don “Toot” Cahoon in the 1990s brought Princeton to the ECAC championship in 1995 before the seventh-seeded Tigers upset their way to their first-ever conference title in 1998 – a feat equaled 20 years later when Fogarty coached seventh-seeded Princeton to its third ECAC Hockey crown – and the 2008 and 2009 teams that qualified for the NCAA tournament by winning the program’s second league championship in the latter year.
It’s the building that drew a direct line from John Messuri to Ryan Kuffner and Andre Faust to Max Veronneau. Jeff Halpern skated four years on the same ice as John McBride, though neither broke the record set by Peter Cook, Henry Bothfeld, and John Cook for goals in a single game.
“Those stories are what I’m really looking forward to sitting down and listening to this weekend,” said Fogarty. “I had the opportunity to speak to Toot Cahoon earlier this week, and he’s coming to celebrate. We’ll have him do our starting lineup as the first coach to bring an ECAC championship to Princeton, and there are a tremendous amount of people that are going to be around for the celebration.”
A strong alumni contingent is expected on hand for a day built around a doubleheader for both the men’s and women’s program. The weekend series against Harvard and Dartmouth offers key ECAC Hockey and Ivy League opponents for both teams, and with a fan fest that begins at 2 p.m., fans will have an opportunity to celebrate the entire hockey culture of the school. The Stanley Cup is scheduled to be in attendance, and pregame ceremonies for both teams will include Olympians from the women’s team’s past and present and General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the United States and a Princeton hockey alum.
“General Milley has such a tremendous presence about him,” Fogarty said. “He takes so much time to speak with our players and has created such a connection with them. He’s already asking about some of our players who have family members in the military, and he’s asked to speak with them. He’s someone who follows Princeton hockey, and he’s someone that a lot of our players look up to and our entire program obviously looks up to him as well.”
But perhaps the greatest achievement of this weekend is how the Tigers committed and ensured both its men’s and women’s program were properly represented. The arena itself is named after Hobey Baker, but it’s often overlooked that Patty Kazmaier – the namesake of “women’s hockey’s Hobey Baker” – is a graduate of the university.
In its earliest days, Princeton won three Ivy League championships in their first six years under inaugural head coach Bill Quackenbush and was an active team underneath the initial ECAC Hockey powerhouses at Brown, Harvard and Dartmouth in the 1990s. A mid-2000s breakthrough under Jeff Kampersal sent the team to its first NCAA tournament, and it later returned in 2016 and again in 2018 under Morey, a Canadian Olympian who helped pave ECAC Hockey’s early success as a player at Brown and a coach with Kampersal.
“This is one of the things we do well at Princeton,” Morey said. “For me as a player, I realized the sacrifices that women had to make in order to allow me to even play, and we really make a real conscious effort to connect to our past. Princeton does a really good job bringing it back, but when something like this happens, I think we’re all going to be blown away by seeing that many alumni in the stands. We really are one giant program here. It’s not men’s hockey or women’s hockey; it’s Princeton hockey, and this event unites our programs and will make that a stronger connection.”
“It’s been a tremendous experience to work with these gifted student-athletes,” Fogarty added. “They’re at the top of their class in the educational part, and they’re very driven to be professional athletes. You have a terrific blend and mixture there. We won a championship in 2018, and we produced a handful of free agents that made the National Hockey League, and it shows how at Princeton, you can earn arguably the best degree in the world while still going after your athletic goals. We want to make sure that for players, this is a destination. We’re showing that now with the recruits that we’re getting.
“It’s a special place, and I’m just very fortunate to be the head coach of this program.”
Saturday’s events begin at 2 p.m. with the start of the Fan Fest event at Princeton, which will run through the second period of the men’s game. The women’s game against Harvard drops the puck at 3 p.m. with the men’s game against Dartmouth at 7 p.m.
