It’s been a great week for hockey in St. Louis: Over the weekend, tens of thousands of fans flocked to Enterprise Center for the NCAA’s Frozen Four tournament, and on Tuesday, the St. Louis Blues clinched a playoff spot with their 6–1 win against Utah.
For Chris Zimmerman, president and CEO of business operations for the Blues, it’s a time of great excitement—and not just for hockey fans. “ When the team starts to get rolling, when they start to feel a sense of momentum, the community feels it as well,” he says. “And quite honestly, when the Blues are winning, there’s a sense of optimism and energy around town and in the region.”
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It also fuels interest in the sport, which Zimmerman has been laser-focused on growing locally since taking his role with the Blues in 2014. Speaking on a new episode of The 314 Podcast that dropped this morning, he notes that when the team first came to St. Louis in 1967, there was just one ice rink across the entire region. “St. Louis was not a hockey town then,” he says. But even in the early years, the Blues were pretty good—and some star players put down roots here. The landscape began to change. Today, by Zimmerman’s count, there are 28 rinks around the metro, and not just young boys but girls increasingly see hockey as an option.
“ Getting young children, boys and girls, to pick up the game is one of our core objectives, because we know if we grow the game of hockey, kids and families participating in it, that’s not our only group of fans, but that’s a very important one,” Zimmerman says.
This past year, the club’s Learn to Play program drew 500 girls ages 5–8, and the strength of the ecosystem is such that the Professional Women’s Hockey League chose St. Louis as one of nine markets to host a game last fall. Asked if a professional women’s hockey team could be a reality in a decade’s time, Zimmerman says, “I could certainly imagine women’s professional hockey coming to St. Louis.”
While the rinks are located around the region, hockey’s success here has been a boon to downtown. Events like the Frozen Four (which notched 33,000 people in attendance across the tournament’s three games) bring tens of thousands of fans to Enterprise Center and, civic leaders hope, the bars, restaurants, and hotels nearby. Counted along with the Arch Madness basketball tournament and the American Collegiate Hockey Association national championships, the Frozen Four is credited with filling 41,000 room nights across the region with an economic impact of $40 million.
It’s always a relief when these destination events go off well. Says Zimmerman, “ Each time we host an event like this, we’re really auditioning for the next round of bids.” And while downtown remains a focus of some angst locally, with some suburbanites insisting it’s just not safe, Zimmerman says that’s not the feedback the team gets from visitors.
“ I certainly understand the challenges we have around downtown, but I’d also say I think sometimes we’re our own harshest critics,” he says. “I can tell you from the feedback that I got over the weekend, which was just universal around how welcoming St. Louis was and the attractions that we have to offer.”
That said, Zimmerman says there are changes the team would like to see downtown, and he says he welcomes the new leadership now in place at both the governor’s office (he calls Gov. Mike Kehoe, a St. Louis native, “a real advocate for St. Louis”) and at City Hall. That’s even though the Blues’ relationship with newly inaugurated Cara Spencer has been a complicated one over the years; she sued to try to stop the city from spending $110 million in taxpayer funds to spruce up Enterprise Center, saying it was the team’s responsibility under its lease. She only dropped the litigation when the team threatened to go after her for attorney’s fees.
“I live every day about what’s next and what’s ahead and our objective at the Blues, at Enterprise Center, we come in every day seeing how we can get better and, and that’s what we’re gonna be focused on,” he says. “And I have no doubt that we’ll be able to work well with her.”
Hear more from Zimmerman on The 314 Podcast.
