Roadrunners' Arena

Landon Arena

Location: Topeka, KS

Opened: 1987

Seating Capacity: 7,773

The next arena I will be covering in my blog is Landon Arena, which is home to the Topeka Roadrunners in the North American Hockey League.

The building sits in the heart of Topeka, Kansas and serves as a multi-purpose venue. The arena is home to hockey games, concerts, monster truck shows, and other entertainment. It is a large arena, especially for an arena hosting a NAHL team. It was similar to the Ohio State Arena that I wrote about earlier because the arena never filled up. There would be roughly 2000 people there but it appeared as if it was empty.

The arena, like many large arenas that I have covered in this blog, the ice surface felt extremely warm and sticky but the boards and glass were lively and forgiving. This arena had dim lightning because they would not use all of the lighting for hockey games. Don’t interpret this the wrong way; there would be sufficient lighting to play a hockey game, but there was no need to use all the lights in the building for a junior hockey game.

The arena had a concourse that divided the lower and upper bowls, similar to most professional arenas. They would sell Topeka Roadrunner jerseys, which is really cool for being a NAHL team. They were a large budget organization so they would have promotional games where they would give away t-shirts to the first 500 fans. Their fans were passionate and they were not afraid to let us know it. There was a group of men who sat behind the visiting team’s bench and they would call themselves the “Bucket Brigade.” These guys would bring a bucket and cowbells so that when our coach would try and talk to us during media timeouts, they would bang the drum and ring the bells so that we couldn’t hear him. Topeka was already a frustrating team to play against to begin with, and having this circus act behind our bench would make it even more difficult to play there. I’ll give it to them though. I don’t get distracted easily by things outside of the rink, but I’ll admit that these guys had real estate in my head.

Topeka’s arena is not one of my favorite arenas to play in, but it was a good venue for a NAHL team. Plus they had very emotional and obnoxious fans, which made it fun to play there.

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-       Joshua Lammon 

Source: https://scotthockey.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/arena.jpg