Hockey on a baseball field?! Charlotte Checkers, Knights turned it into a rink of dreams
The news for Charlotte pro sports teams over the past few years has been mostly bad. Losing seasons, fired coaches, injured players, tossed drinks — if it’s not one thing, it’s another.
So Saturday night in the Queen City was a welcome respite. In a collaboration between two of the best and most affordable sports teams in the area, the Charlotte Checkers played an outdoor hockey game on an ice rink set up on the Charlotte Knights’ baseball field.
It was called the Queen City Outdoor Classic, and it’s been in the works for years. It has brought some people to tears as they tried to plan it, so difficult were the logistics and the vagaries of the weather.
But it came off beautifully Saturday night as the Checkers played the Rochester Americans, with lots of the action taking place around what normally would be second base. A sellout crowd of 11,031 — the largest crowd in Truist Field history for a sporting event — bundled up and watched the action on a clear night with temperatures in the low 40s. The game was scheduled at night to avoid a potential 65-degree sunny day and melting ice in the afternoon.
But the weather cooperated and so did the players, playing in the type of venue where many of them learned to play hockey in the first place. There was snow tubing going on in the outfield, views of Charlotte’s skyscrapers from just about everywhere, and hot chocolate selling like hotcakes for $5.50 a cup at the concession stands.
The game was a roaring success, in other words, and one I hope returns to Charlotte at least every few years. Outdoor hockey can work in a southern city like Charlotte — Saturday night was just the latest example. A rink of dreams? Yep. They built it on a baseball field, and the people certainly came.
The Checkers players used words such as “fun” and “special” and “cool” and “unique” afterward to describe the scene.
The result? The Checkers won 5-2, so that was nice for the home folks — although not many people will remember that in a few weeks.
People usually don’t remember wins or losses when going to a minor-league baseball or hockey game. The total game-night experience is what the minor leagues are selling, even the top level of the minors such as the Checkers and Knights, and they’re selling it more affordably than the Carolina Panthers and Charlotte Hornets do.
So when the Panthers have just completed an NFL-worst 2-15 season and are about to hire their annual coach, and the Hornets are 8-28 and among the NBA’s worst, a game like this where you can get in for about $35 and see something as unusual as what you did Saturday night ranks as quite a bargain.
Still, while the outdoor game looked seamless from above, below there was a whole lot of frantic paddling going on.
The Knights and Checkers should be commended for all this game took, and for the contingency plans that ultimately weren’t needed. For instance, the game was scheduled Saturday night, but would have been postponed to Sunday or even Monday if weather had interfered. That was the reasoning behind scheduling it on a holiday weekend.
“A lot goes into it,” Dan Rajkowski, the Charlotte Knights’ chief operating officer, said Saturday before the game, “and it is intrusive to a baseball field. And in three months we’ve got to play baseball. But it’s a large enough event and a marquee enough of an event that we wanted to do it. And the timing was right. Covid kind of created some of this. Really, the bad things of Covid turned into the Light the Knights Festival, which turned into a hockey game.”
The Light the Knights Festival has been a major success at Truist Field for the past several years, with snow tubing, ice skating and vendors scattered around the ballpark from roughly Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day. On one Saturday not long ago, it drew 14,000 people. That event also showed that ice can be maintained in Truist Field, even with unpredictable weather.
The Checkers, led by COO Tera Black, were just happy this game went off as scheduled.
“It’s like we’ve been planning a royal wedding,” Black said just before the puck dropped. “It’s a beautiful collaboration of so many talented people, and to get to this point is a huge relief, and incredibly exciting.”
The crowd was a mash-up of hardcore hockey fans and people just out for a unique evening and a good time. Most stayed for the fireworks at the end — a minor-league baseball staple that doesn’t translate well to indoor hockey. It was literally a cool collaboration all the way around.
This story was originally published January 14, 2024 at 5:30 AM.
