ABOR approves $115 million ice hockey, multi-purpose arena for ASU
Nov 20, 2020, 11:29 AM | Updated: 2:56 pm
(Twitter screenshot/@craigsmorgan)
The Arizona State men’s ice hockey program, as well as other Sun Devil athletics, will soon have a new home.
The Arizona Board of Regents approved a proposal Thursday for a new ice hockey and multi-purpose arena to be built on the Tempe campus, the school confirmed.
“It will have a wide range of uses. We do anticipate that it will be the home for the Sun Devil men’s hockey team,” Morgan Olsen, ASU executive vice president, treasurer and chief financial officer, told KTAR News 92.3 FM’s Griselda Zetino this week.
“It also will support the competitions for the men’s wrestling team and the Sun Devil women’s gymnastic team. We’ll have enough flexibility that theoretically we could host other sporting events in there as well, both university sponsored and things that may be external to the institution. But also we anticipate this arena will host lots of ASU events beyond Sun Devil athletics.”
Other possible events include student activities and Valley community gatherings, Olsen said. He added the institution foresees the potential of offering all kinds of entertainment events, family events, musical events and performances.
The plans for the $115 million arena were originally approved the ABOR financial, capital and resources committee on Nov. 5.
The university is expected to pay for the venue using the combination of charitable gifts, revenues from the activities in the arena and through a revenue stream from the Novus Innovation Corridor.
Construction for the arena is expected to begin in January 2021, with a completion date targeted for December 2022.
It’s a smaller venue to ASU’s standards, Olsen said, with 5,000 seats in the arena, but will help fill a big void for the university.
“We’ve been working on this now for over three years,” Olsen said. “We started fundraising for the venue for our men’s ice hockey team, we’re in our fourth year of full NCAA Division I competition. We started fundraising right away and here we are. The team is very successful.
“We have these other needs and so it brings more opportunities to bear to make that happen. We have the opportunity now to start construction on that facility. … It will take approximately two years to build. It can’t come too soon at this point.”
ASU’s hockey program has been based out of Tempe’s Oceanside Ice Arena. The new location is expected to sit on South Packard Drive in Tempe.
The naming rights have yet to be revealed, but Olsen called it “the single largest gift toward the construction of the facility.”
KTAR News’ Griselda Zetino contributed to this report.