Heritage, sport tourism and Canadian junior hockey: nostalgia for social experience or sport place?

Abstract

North American cities, working with their respective sports franchises, have built new facilities which have deliberately embraced romanticized notions of their sporting pasts. In this instance, the nostalgia experience is tied closely to the facility itself. However, not all sports facilities have embraced heritage elements in their design and used heritage as a vehicle for nostalgia sport tourism. Facilities built for major junior hockey in Canada have tended more toward functionality, with an absence of nostalgia from the place-experience of attendees. This article reviews the operations of junior hockey and its trends of arena construction over the past decade, in order to determine why this sport has not explicitly sought to use its arenas for nostalgia tourism development purposes. It is argued that nostalgia for junior hockey is reflected in nostalgia for social experience (the act of attending a game) and not nostalgia for sport place or artefact (the hockey arena itself). However, nostalgia for sport place does exist for hockey when considering the sport as part of Canadian identity, where the manifestation of nostalgia for hockey fans takes the game back to its outdoor roots.