Locker room prepared for Utah Hockey Club ahead of inaugural season
Nov 15, 2024, 1:25 PM | Updated: 1:37 pm
SALT LAKE CITY — Making the Delta Center feel like home for Utah’s new hockey team has been a top priority.
While they had only a few months to prepare for the puck drop, they made sure the players had their own locker room.
It would have been easy to just “make do” for the inaugural season of the Utah Hockey Club. Nobody would have blamed the Smith Entertainment Group for just throwing a couple locker rooms together and waiting until next season to make things right.
But that’s not how Ryan and Ashley Smith do things.
Utah Hockey Club jersey features an inaugural season patch, pictured on Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2024. (Jack Grimm, KSL TV)
“It was easy. We have an NHL team; we need an NHL locker room. There just wasn’t any discussion beyond that. The only limitation was physical space,” said Jaime Galileo, senior vice president for operations and construction at the Delta Center.
Beyond the usual demolition of an existing room — what used to be the friends and family lounge for the Utah Jazz — they had to dig a tunnel under the Delta Center.
“Sounds so much easier than it actually was,” Galileo said.
Finishing touches are still being added, and there are special touches too. Traditionally, NHL teams have their logo on the floor in the middle of the locker room, but the Utah Hockey Club has theirs lit up on the ceiling.
The ceiling of the new UHC locker room features the lit-up hockey team logo. (Jack Grimm, KSL TV)
In the spirit of teamwork, the Utah Jazz and the Utah Hockey Club will share therapy, training and team lounging space between their locker rooms. But their locker rooms will be a space all their own, meticulously crafted and infused with vision and some of the coolest LEDs around.
The locker room offers far more than functional space: This is the space where players express emotion, vent frustration over the course of an 82-game season and, of course, celebrate wins.
Often, in these locker rooms, lifelong friendships are bonded. Not only might the guy sitting next to you end up being the best man at your wedding or marry your sister — he might someday hand you the Stanley Cup.
“The team really wanted a space that felt like home,” Galileo said.
More changes are still to come for the Delta Center. During the off-season, they plan on overhauling fan seating to get rid of obstructed views — and replace them with a wall of fans.
