Hometown Hockey Heroes

It’s game night at the Mountain America Center in Idaho Falls. The stands are packed with a sold-out crowd of 4,200.

Lights dim, people cheer. Rock music pumps through the sound system, flames shoot out, smoke swirls, and flashing red, orange, and white strobes streak across the stands. The music builds to a crescendo, and the Idaho Falls Spud Kings hockey players spill out onto the ice, skating in circles under the sparkling lights.

The fans jump to their feet, roaring. The atmosphere is electric with their excitement. You’d think you were watching a professional hockey game, but the Idaho Falls Spud Kings are in fact teenagers. The oldest players are just twenty years old. Their skills, however, are worthy of the fanfare.

The Spud Kings are a Tier 2 team in the National Collegiate Development Conference of the United States Premier Hockey League. Players from all over the country and the world join the league to hone their skills in hopes of moving on to play Division I college hockey. Their stop in Idaho Falls is giving them a taste of what realizing those dreams could feel like. The city has embraced the team and its players with passion. In their first season just two years ago, all but three of the home games were sold out.

“Players here are treated like royalty,” says Kelsey Salsbery, the director of marketing at the Mountain America Center. “They get asked for autographs. People buy them lunch when they wear their jerseys around town. It’s pretty exciting for sixteen to twenty-year-olds.”

Kelsey thinks Idaho Falls’ long, dark winters are part of what has made the team so popular. Plus, the city’s only other semi-professional team is the Chukars baseball team, which plays in the summer, leaving people hungry for live athletic events when the snow starts to fly. And the team’s venue, the Mountain America Center, is brand new—doors opened in 2022—and state-of-the-art.

In addition to the elaborate special effects that entertain the crowd and hype up the players, the shiny new arena has first-class facilities for the team, their support staff, and the fans. Private viewing boxes along the upper tiers of the stands sold out before the first season. The food concessions along the main concourse serve up everything from mac and cheese to burgers, pizza, barbecue, tacos, and, of course, because it’s the Spud Kings, potatoes. At ToPo Tato you can get potatoes served just about any way you can think of, including the classic Canadian hockey food, poutine.

Chris Hall, assistant general manager for the Spud Kings in the winter and the general manager of baseball operations for the Chukars team in the summer, says that the operations department didn’t know what to expect when the team started. Idaho Falls isn’t known as a hockey town.

“It’s been a crazy response,” Chris says. “No other junior hockey team, except maybe those in Tier I, have the crowds we get. We have two thousand season ticket holders, and a waitlist of eight hundred. That’s not a normal thing. It’s helped us recruit great players.”

Spud King games are fun, family-friendly, and economical. For $21 an adult can have an exciting night out on the town. Chris says his wife has no interest in hockey, but she loves going to the Spud Kings games because they’re an entertaining social event.

Players are housed with local families. Jessica Tompkins says when her family heard the team was looking for hosts, they sat down and talked it over. The Tompkinses have three teenage children of their own, and didn’t really know much about hockey. But they decided it sounded fun to support a young player on his athletic journey, so they opened up their house. They’ve had five players live with them so far, and are looking forward to one of those players returning this fall.

“We love hockey,” Jessica says. “But we didn’t know how much we loved hockey until we started going to the games.”

The Tompkinses have always supported each other’s athletic pursuits by attending games, and that tradition has continued with the hockey players who have lived in their house. They’ve even traveled to watch the Spud Kings play away games, and Jessica says the contrast between the environment at Mountain America Center and that at other venues is stark.

“The arena is new and big and packed with fans who love hockey and love the team,” she says. “These things have given the Spud Kings a reputation. Players may not have heard of Idaho Falls, but they’ve heard of the Spud Kings.”

Jessica says it was a little traumatic for her family when the first player who stayed with them came home one day and announced he’d been traded. He was gone the next morning. She says now they’ve gotten more used to the players coming and going, although it’s hard on all of them. They grow to look at them as part of their family and hate to see them leave. But she says they recognize playing with different teams is part of the players’ development and future, and they’ve stayed in touch with all of the boys who’ve bunked at their house.

Mountain America Center’s ice is available for use nine months of the year, and local hockey teams and figure skaters use it when the Spud Kings are not. Kelsey says there’s been an uptick in interest in local hockey leagues, and she guesses it’s a spillover from the Spud Kings’ popularity.

In addition, the arena hosts concerts and special events throughout the year. When the ice is down, transforming the hockey rink into a concert stage takes roughly twelve hours.

“Often in the winter we have a hockey game on Friday and a concert on Saturday,” Kelsey says. “There are lots of overnight conversion fairies working to set up the venue.”

Like the Spud Kings, non-hockey events at the Mountain America Center have been popular. Luke Bryan, a decorated country singer and a judge on American Idol, sold out in a day. Kelsey says she is starting to field calls from other touring musicians eager to add a stop in Idaho Falls between Boise and Salt Lake because they’ve heard the town has great fans and that it’s close to places to vacation.

“Before the Mountain America Center opened, we projected we’d have 150,000 guests in the first year,” she says. “We actually had 250,000. We smashed all the projections, and it doesn’t seem to have tapered off yet.”

Tickets are available at ticketmaster.com or at the venue’s box office during open hours. mountainamericacenter.com