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With a permanent outdoor rink built to NHL standards and a massive video board already in place two miles east of downtown Hastings, and the fiscal support of myriad sponsors jumping into the fray, organizers of Hockey Day Minnesota 2026 figured 24 hours just wouldn’t be enough.
Born in 2007 on a frozen river just a long slap shot from the Canadian border in Baudette, the event which started as a one-day affair has grown a little bit here and there over the past decade-plus. A “Hockey Day Weekend” that began with games on Thursday and ran through Saturday, when the televised nationally televised marquee matchups happen. became the standard a few years ago.
But in Hastings this year, they’ve taken it to a whole new level.
“It’s Hockey Week Minnesota,” said Kevin Gorg, who has been one of the mainstays calling the games on TV for FanDuel Sports Network since the event began. “It’s changed a lot, and it feels like every year the next city in line wants to out-do the previous one. It’s gotten bigger and better and they’ve learned what works, they’ve learned what fans are looking for and what types of experiences they want.”
The actual Hockey Day Minnesota in 2026 will be Saturday, Jan. 24, when the Hastings girls will host Park, the Hastings boys will host East Ridge, and Rock Ridge will face St. Thomas Academy. It will include a full day of TV programming, culminating with the Wild hosting Florida that evening at Grand Casino Arena. But by then, the 5,000-seat HDM site, located at the United Heroes League complex, will be a well-known destination for hockey teams and fans in the state.
In all, there will be eight days of scheduled games and exhibitions at the Hastings rink, starting Saturday morning, Jan. 17 with four varsity prep games.
Community creation
Shane Hudella, who founded United Heroes League as Defending the Blue Line in 2009, is overseeing nearly every aspect of Hockey Day at their rink that’s situated in a scenic meadow between the Mississippi River to the north and the wooded bluffs to the south. He said that with all of the infrastructure they have in place and the overwhelming support from sponsors and the community, having it all on-line for just two or three days didn’t make sense.
“It’s Hockey Week in Hastings,” he said, speaking in one of the four permanent locker rooms on site as a junior team from St. Cloud finished up a morning skate. Hudella and a group from Hastings attended the Hockey Day Minnesota in Warroad two years ago, and in Shakopee last year, learning what works and what is needed to make this event a high-profile success.
“Warroad was great to learn some right ways to do things, from a fan experience and from a rinkside perspective. Our VIP tent mimics theirs,” Hudella said. “We learned some things in their (fan) village for layout that really helped us out.”
In Shakopee, where the event was held in the parking lot of Valleyfair theme park, with rollercoasters as a memorable backdrop to the rink, sponsorship dollars were reportedly harder to come by. There, the 2026 organizers got a good reminder of how much money is needed to make this event work, and made a concerted effort to get things fiscally sound almost from the day Hastings was announced as the future host.
Hudella said they have found generous sponsors to the tune of more than $1 million, and the results show in an outdoor rink set up with a capacity larger than anything seen at Hockey Day Minnesota in recent years, along with multiple tents where fans can get food, beverages, merchandise and hear an extensive schedule of live music while they warm up between periods and unwind after games.
“So just from a business perspective, to make that investment in infrastructure, we wanted to stretch the event and capture more revenue to offset it,” Hudella said. “There’s so much interest around Hockey Day and we were just inundated with teams that wanted to be a part of it, so we didn’t think we were going to struggle to find programming.”
On Saturday, Jan. 17, a full week before the actually scheduled Hockey Day Minnesota, Hudella said they were expecting upwards of 10,000 fans for the quartet of high school games.
Getting there
The biggest anticipated challenge is traffic management and parking. The site is in a rural area outside of the community’s historic downtown and riverfront, with one primary road – Ravenna Trail – leading to Hastings in one direction and to Treasure Island Resort and Casino in the other. There is parking on site for roughly 2,000 to 2,500 vehicles (at $20 per car), but with the number of games and the amount of interest in being a part of the week of festivities, organizers are promoting arriving early, carpooling and even using the shuttles that will be available from park and ride lots in Hastings and at the casino.
“We think most of the local community is prepared for it and understands, yeah, we’re going to have some backups,” Hudella said. “But I think between the (police department), MNDOT and the county, everything will be pretty well-marked for people coming to the event.”
The highest-profile event among the more than 30 games and scrimmages scheduled for the Hastings rink is Friday evening, Jan. 23, when the Minnesota Wild’s top AHL minor league team, the Iowa Wild, faces the Milwaukee Admirals, who are the Nashville Predators’ farm team.
But they also have put together opportunities for fun away from the rink, including a lighted skating path that winds a little less than a mile through the nearby woods, and an ice mini-golf course that uses sticks and pucks in place of putters and golf balls.
On a recent afternoon, after days of sun and above freezing temps, the skating path looked a bit slushy, but Hudella offered assurance that with the thermometer dropping to near zero in the coming forecast, the ice would be in good shape by the time the gates opened for real.
Slappers and songs
They also have developed a notable schedule of live music in one of the on-site fan tents, with 18 different acts – many of them from Hastings and the region – booked for the eight days of the event.
“We have this massive, massive entertainment tent and we wanted to have an opportunity for all of the local bands in our small town to play a big stage for an hour or two,” Hudella said.
Having been to more than a dozen previous incarnations of Hockey Day Minnesota, in weather varying from bright sunshine which made the ice a challenge in Moorhead (2011) to some dangerously low wind chill nights in Bemidji (2019), Gorg relishes playing a role in this event that has become like a state holiday.
He also understands that for the few hundred kids that will get to play a game in Hastings this year, or in Brainerd next year, or wherever else Hockey Day Minnesota is held beyond 2027, the hour or two they spend there will be a highlight of their lives in the game.
“For all of us that get to work the games, we don’t take that lightly, because these are lifelong memories,” Gorg said. “Not everybody gets to play in the State Tournament, right? So if you’re lucky enough to be a part of the Hockey Day celebration that week and you’re going to play on that big stage, on that rink, we think that’s really cool for the kids and their families.”
Tickets, parking and transportation information, a full schedule of games and information about live music and food vendors are available at the official Hockey Day Minnesota website, hockeydaymn.com.