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| Photo Credit: Ric Kruszynski |
Location: Erie, Pennsylvania
Opened: 1983
Seating Capacity: 6,833
The next arena I will be examining is the Erie Insurance Arena, which is home to the Erie Otters in the Ontario Hockey League and the Erie BayHawks of the NBA Development League.
The Erie Insurance Arena is not home to any Atlantic Hockey team, or any college hockey team for that matter. It is located in downtown Erie and serves as home to the Erie Otters and Erie BayHawks. The venue is also used for concerts; I have seen Breaking Benjamin, Jason Aldean, and Thomas Rhett play in the arena. You may then be wondering why I am writing about this arena. It's because we opened up our season this year playing Penn State University at the Erie Insurance Arena.
The arena, due to its nature, is much larger than most arenas I have played at while playing collegiate hockey. It has a strange maroon theme that is painted on the walls of the suites and the seats. It makes the arena very dark as the ceiling rafters are painted a gun metal grey too. The seats wrap around 3/4 of the ice rink with suite windows placed above the fourth end. There is also an enormous jumbo-tron located above center ice.
Like many big arenas, the ice appears to be much larger than a regular sheet of ice. Of course, it is still the regulation size. The ice surface, if I recall correctly, seemed to be very sticky and slow because of the warm weather that Erie had in early October. It is extremely difficult to maintain a good ice surface in hot and humid weather, especially in an arena this large.
We hosted Penn State University in the second Snowtown Throwdown to open up our 2016-17 campaign. This was the first meeting between Mercyhurst and Penn State. It was a substantial marketing event because it was a battle between Pennsylvania schools. Unfortunately, the marketing attracted more blue and white Penn State fans than it did Laker Lunatics, despite the Lakers supposedly having the home-ice advantage.
It was a fun environment to play in "irregardless" (my teammates will understand) of the Penn State crowd. It is always cool playing Big Ten teams because they get more recognition and publicity than the schools in our conference. The game, however, did not end in our favor. We were badly defeated by Penn State, but to our credit, they were ranked as the #2 team in college hockey earlier this season. With that being said, myself, nor my team, uses that as an excuse to beating we received. As our coach always says, "There are no moral victories in hockey." I believe that we are expected to host a tournament at Erie Insurance my senior year, so I will get one more chance at victory in the facility.
Thank you for your continued support of my blog. Please feel free to share with your friends and family!
- Joshua Lammon
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| Photo Credit: Ric Kruszynski |
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| Photo Credit: Ric Kruszynski |
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| Photo Credit: Ric Kruszynski |
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| Photo Credit: Ric Kruszynski |
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| Photo Credit: Ric Kruszynski |
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