UGA’s Ice Dawgs Hockey Team to Play at New Classic Center Arena

SPLOST, a financing method for funding capital outlay projects in Georgia. The facility will join the multi-use Classic Center next door, a complex that includes a performing arts theater, conference center, and outdoor pavilion for weddings, concerts and sports.

Project backers have predicted the Classic Center Arena will create 600 jobs and generate 90,000 more hotel room nights annually, with an overall impact of $30 million per year.

The 192,000-sq.-ft. project broke ground in February 2022 and is currently expected to finish construction in February 2024,

Urbanize Atlanta learned earlier this year. It joins million-dollar condominiums and a transformative mixed-use development as projects of significant scale in downtown Athens’ planning pipeline.

The Georgia Ice Dawgs once called the Classic Center complex home, often playing before soldout crowds. Prior to that, though, the team was forced to travel to the Atlanta Ice Forum in Duluth, where games were played in front of few spectators and without the atmosphere that had existed at the team’s home matches in Athens.

“When the [Ice Dawgs were] playing in Duluth, it was pretty much just the parents that would come,” Austin Krusko, a former player, told the Red & Black, an Athens news, sports and culture online site. “There really was not a big fan base. Even the people that love UGA and the students here just were not too interested in making that hour-long drive.”

During the 2015-16 season — the Ice Dawgs’ second full season at the former Classic Center arena — the squad won its first South Eastern Collegiate Hockey Conference championship.

They continued by winning two of the next three SECHC title games, as well as qualifying for back-to-back American Collegiate

Hockey Association Division 3 National Championships in the 2016-17 and 2017-18 seasons.

However, in late January or early February of every season, the Ice Dawgs had to move across the street to the Classic Center’s Foundry Pavilion, an outdoor venue that cost the team some fan attendance due to cold weather and reduced seating.

That led to the Athens-Clarke County Mayor and Commission in July 2019 to add a proposal to provide $34 million toward the construction of a new arena at the Classic Center complex to the SPLOST 2020 project list, and voters approved the measure.

When finished next winter, the new arena will not only give the Ice Dawgs a permanent home for games, but create a significant advantage for future players, as they will no longer have to resort to practicing on the local YMCA field. The new venue will remain within walking distance of UGA’s North Campus.

The Red & Black said a new facility also will play a role in attracting potential Ice Dawgs’ players. It also is likely to create an advantage over other schools in the SECHC, like Florida, which practices and plays in Jacksonville, nearly 75 mi. from its campus in Gainesville. 