When the weekends grow cold and dark in the Minnesota winter, many Macalester students pack into the A-line bus to ride the three stops up to the Charles M. Schulz-Highland Arena to watch their men’s and women’s club hockey teams compete.
While not every game fills out the stands at the arena, many of them do. No other club sport receives this kind of attention from the Macalester student body. Many varsity sports don’t receive this kind of attention. Hockey is different.
“For some reason, all the hockey games are really well-attended,” Finn Veerkamp ’25, who announces the games broadcasts, said. “Everyone really gets behind that team as sort of a symbol of sportsmanship and collective excitement, whatever you want to call it. Showing up and cheering, and hearing a few hundred people cheer alongside you, is always a blast, and you don’t always get that at a school like this.”
Most Macalester students come from out of state or country and many — including Veerkamp — had never paid attention to hockey before Macalester. The sport’s relevance is highly geographical. Once they arrive in the Twin Cities, some students have a desire to connect and identify with what it means to be, at least temporarily, a Minnesotan.
“It’s a very Minnesotan thing,” Rohan Mittra ’27, who joined the men’s team after playing hockey in Minnesota for nearly his entire life, said. “And so I think there’s just a curiosity, for this school in particular, where people come from everywhere, that they just want to know what a hockey game is.”
Hockey is not a sport that lends itself to late adoption. It already has a high barrier to entry, which has sent participation across Minnesota into a historic decline. The primary issue is the gear, which can cost hundreds of dollars, even used. Macalester provides it all for free.
Skill also poses a hurdle. Most professional and varsity players have skated since childhood. They grow up on the ice. Captain Adley Schwartz ’25, on the other hand, learned how to skate his sophomore year.
Despite its wealth of rookies, Macalester hockey also draws many Minnesotans, which leads to a wide range in player skills. Hockey requires not only skilled shooting, passing and defense, but also the ability to skate well — club soccer doesn’t have to teach players how to run.
“The truth, and I think this is one of the things that makes our team both hard to manage, but also really fun, is that we have such different levels of players,” Schwartz said. “We have our players who played in Minnesota high school and were some of the best hockey players, period, for their age. Versus we have people who have never seen a puck. Trying to make it into a competitive situation doesn’t really make sense, because what we would be doing is cutting our players.”
Every player, no matter their skill, receives the same amount of ice time. Hockey divides 20 players into four lines of five players at each position. They rotate through 45-second- to 2-minute-long shifts until they tire, and then swap to the next line. Other teams, like Carleton College, barely play their third and fourth lines, if at all. Macalester rotates through them all evenly. While they always play to win, they also want everyone to have a good time.
Associate Director of Athletics Steve Murray, who has managed club sports for seven years, noted that in previous seasons, the men’s team have looked for bigger crowds with Friday and Saturday night games, while the women’s teams have gone for afternoon slots. More recently, both teams have sought those higher-attended late night slots, and doubleheaders have become more popular. It’s not uncommon for players on the women’s team to play on the mens and vice versa.
The major difference between men’s and women’s hockey is that body checking isn’t allowed in the women’s sport. But for the men’s team, as they’re not in a league, the teams determine the level of physicality on a game-to-game basis. Most of the, as they’re commonly called, “beer leagues” or rec adult teams they play don’t allow roughhousing.
The games they play against Carleton and St. Olaf College do allow checking, though. This year has seen more of what Schwartz described as “tomfoolery,” particularly in games against Carleton.
The Knights’ crowd, he added, is particularly creative in their jeers. Rivalries manifest on and off the rink. Shouts from the sidelines and on-ice fights rile each other up.
The Highland Arena is an intimate space. Even the furthest bleachers are close to the action, which makes any physicality more intense in the fan experience. This crowd and team energy feeding off of each other translates best in-person. Veerkamp has noticed this effect.
“This is kind of ironic, because I’m the person who brings it to the small screen, but I don’t think [hockey] translates very well to a screen,” Veerkamp said. “I think you have to be there to follow it, [and] really appreciate it. So I never really cared for hockey before [seeing it in-person at Mac].”
Being in-person builds a bombastic sense of competitiveness and community. Other schools usually find that at football games, and while some varsity sports draw high attendance, it feels appropriate for Macalester to find themselves at their most impassioned at club hockey.
The crowd might be what keeps bringing people back to a sport they weren’t interested in before. But the fun fan experience is not only a happenstance of hockey itself, but also choices the captains make.
“Some games are more about the ‘production’ than others,” Felicia Winfrey ’25, a women’s team captain, said. “We started having the aux board on all the time, so that anytime the puck stops, there’s music that goes on … That was an intentional choice that we made to have people enjoy the games more. Having the mascot, or having bagpipes, and sometimes we throw stuff to the crowd. All of that is stuff that we’re thinking of as captains … because yes, [the games are] about hockey, but, obviously, we’re not that good at hockey, so it’s not really so much about the game. It’s about a community gathering space for people to sit with their friends and enjoy something besides school.”
Club sport captains are leaders and coaches for the teams in the traditional sense, but they also do all the administrative work. They directly shape the team into what they want it to be. For club hockey, that’s a place of community for the team and for the school.
As Murray has observed over his 17 years working with Macalester Athletics, hockey has always been the most highly-attended club sport. He identifies its success as a direct result of the captain’s work.
“Hockey has always been consistent,” he said. “They’ve always done a good job of … making sure [to support new captains] as they step into the role so they know how to do everything, and [the team] just keeps being operated at a high level.”
Veerkamp sees the hockey teams taking advantage of time and place to make the games draw crowds other club sports don’t always see.
“There are a few dimensions that have very little to do with hockey that get a lot of people out,” he said. “I think one is the timing of the games. 9 p.m. on a Friday is sort of a prime time spot for Macalester kids who feel the pull of the weekend but go to Macalester so there’s not, you know, a social scene that’s bursting with opportunity, per se. Not to drag Mac unnecessarily.”
Most games happen on Friday and Saturday nights, and they’re open and heavily advertised to the Macalester community, which encourages a party atmosphere.
“[From the commentating booth] I get to see the audience, most of whom have consumed several more standard drinks than I,” Veerkamp said.
Mac’s cheers and fan culture was once a huge part of campus culture. The ‘Drink blood, smoke crack’ chant was voted by Mental Floss as one of the seven most memorable sports chants. That same fervor doesn’t appear at many varsity games today. Sometimes the campus community seems to hold its athletics at a distance, but club hockey finds many niches around campus and draws out their school pride.
Before Schwartz joined the team, they recalled how trips to games were more engaging than walking to the Leonard Center for a basketball game.
“Everybody gets on the A line, and you’re all partying,” Schwartz said. “It’s a Friday night. It’s just the perfect way to start off, or conclude, a weekend. Everybody you know is going to be there, you’re all having a great time. And as a community, we’re like, ‘We’re going to see the hockey game.’”
*Finn Veerkamp is a staff writer for The Mac Weekly.
