Many Utahns are familiar with the proverbial wise man who built his house upon a rock, as well as his counterpart, the foolish man who built his house upon the sand.
In the children’s song, the wise man’s house withstands the rain, while the foolish man watches his wash away.
Smith Entertainment Group is building a “house,” and the first order of business was to construct a “rock” as its foundation.
It’s still a work in progress, but two years into the Utah Mammoth’s tenure in the Beehive State, the fan base — the rock — is getting stronger.
If you somehow stumbled into the Delta Center on April 24 without knowing the circumstances, for example, the volume may have made you think the Mammoth were ending a 14-year playoff drought like the Buffalo Sabres.
While the state’s first-ever Stanley Cup Playoff game was a long-awaited event for many Mammoth faithful, a major portion of the fan base couldn’t have told you which end of a hockey stick to use just two years ago.
That growth does not happen by accident.
Here’s how the Utah Mammoth are building a fan base from the ground up, selling out 85 consecutive home games in a nontraditional hockey market.
Building an army from scratch
It’s one thing to get adults excited about hockey, but to build a permanent fan base, you have to get the kids involved too. After all, they’re the ones who will continue the traditions for decades to come.
The Mammoth have invested heavily in the youth hockey scene for that reason.
It began with constructing the Mammoth Ice Center: a two-ice-sheet facility in Sandy shared between the NHL players and the general public.
The team typically only uses it in the mornings and early afternoons, so it opens in the evenings for youth and adult rec hockey, learn-to-skate programs and open skate sessions.
“It’s pretty incredible that these little ‘Mighty Mite’ hockey players are playing in our hockey facility with dreams of playing in the NHL,” Chris Barney, president of revenue and commercial strategy for SEG, told the Deseret News. “If you fast-forward 20 years from now, I hope we’ve got a handful of Utah natives playing in the league and that their introduction to the game came when the Mammoth arrived here.”
The Junior Jazz program, which SEG hosts on the basketball side, has enjoyed immense success.
It hosts about 70,000 kids each year, which Barney says is the largest youth basketball program in the United States. One of the many kids who went through it is former Utah State star and current Cleveland Cavaliers shooting guard Sam Merrill.
While the goal is for Utah to consistently produce NHLers, high-level youth hockey is not SEG’s main focus at this point in time. Right now, they want to facilitate as many introductions to hockey as possible.
For many kids, the easiest way to get into the sport is through street hockey — played with shoes and a ball, not rollerblades and a puck.
The concept of using a stick to control a ball is foreign enough to most kids, let alone figuring out how to maneuver themselves on skates at the same time. Street hockey allows them to master the first task before worrying about the second.
“Our primary focus is definitely on the street hockey side, just kind of helping to make it more accessible and easier to play,” said Mammoth youth program director Kristen Bowness. “... Street hockey is a great way to learn all the different rules and stuff like that.”
The Mammoth host street hockey clinics all across the Wasatch Front, ranging from introductory clinics to camps, leagues and tournaments.
Among the program’s biggest obstacles, though, is one that’s self-inflicted.
“One of our biggest challenges is that Junior Jazz has just done such a good job that there’s just not a lot of availability,” Bowness said.
“A lot of gyms are already booked up. A lot of parks and recs are already running programming, so finding that time to be able to run street hockey has been a challenge. But again, it’s just because we did such a good job on the Jazz side, so you can’t get too mad at it.”
Bowness and her team also host introductory on-ice programs.
Parents can sign their kids up for an eight-week clinic where they’ll learn some basics. It comes with a full set of equipment for the child to keep, reducing the financial burden of future hockey endeavors.
SEG is also hoping to work with local municipalities and entrepreneurs to facilitate the construction of additional ice rinks in Utah, which would make room for the rapid growth that SEG is already seeing in youth hockey. As of the time of our interview with Barney, SEG had not matched with any suitors on that front.
Creating ‘magical moments’
Hockey has a way of drawing people in. It’s a frequent occurrence for a lifelong hockey fan to be created after just one game in an NHL building, so the Mammoth do everything they can to foster those connections.
“We’re very intentional about creating magical moments for our fans when they come in the building,” Barney said.
Even the most meaningless game in the depth of the regular season is important, he says, because it’s almost certainly someone’s first experience with hockey.
“We take the stewardship and that responsibility really seriously.”
Those magical moments can come from a variety of angles — many of which can’t be manufactured.
Sometimes, it’s through typical sporting event things like well-timed music and mascot shenanigans. Other times, it takes innovation: a rideable, mammoth-shaped Zamboni; playoff towels in the regular season; a drum line marching around the concourse for playoff games.
“We don’t struggle to try to implement ideas,” said team owner Ryan Smith at a press conference ahead of the franchise’s first home playoff game. “We’re not afraid of failure. I’ve said that from the beginning. We just have a rule here that we fail and we fail fast when we do, and then we move on and get it right.”
Smith has drawn attention by periodically offering free tickets on social media to people who haven’t experienced a game yet, often including Toyota Club passes to cover dinner, too.
“Uniformly, when we expose people to the game, there is an immediate attraction and they feel what all of us who have been doing this for two years have felt,” Barney said. “‘Wow, that was incredible.’ ‘I love the passion of the fans.’ ‘I can’t believe how many jerseys are in the crowd.’ ‘What an awesome environment that has been created.’”
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has seen that time and time again over his 34 seasons at the helm of the league as he’s put teams in markets like Dallas, Las Vegas, Nashville and so on.
“When people have an opportunity to sample NHL hockey, they gravitate to it and it does well,” he said at the aforementioned pre-playoff press conference alongside Smith.
Turning lemons into lemonade
The public’s perception of the Delta Center’s limited-view seating situation is that it’s the Mammoth’s biggest disadvantage — but it has played a major role as the Mammoth try to grow the game in Utah.
Why? Because it draws in the most casual of fans.
In many NHL buildings, tickets cost nothing short of an appendage, pricing out the average Joe. In Utah, those limited-view seats sell for the cost of a movie ticket, eliminating that barrier to entry entirely.
As mentioned, it often takes just one NHL experience to hook new fans — and that experience can happen even with a limited view.
Of course, it can’t stay like that forever. SEG is currently in the second stage of a three-summer renovation to give every seat a full view. The understanding is that ticket prices will reflect that.
Barney and his team hope, though, that they’ve already built enough of a following that it won’t be a problem.
“(With) all the data behind the scenes on the number of people coming to games, the unique buyers, we continue to be very bullish with where that’s going,” he said.
Being competitive from the first faceoff
When the then-Utah Hockey Club took the ice for the first time in October 2024, it scored before the first TV timeout.
The team leveraged that momentum into a three-game winning streak to begin the franchise’s history. Although there have been speed bumps along the way, the team has always given the fans a reason to hope — and that’s what sports fandom is all about.
After giving the market its first Stanley Cup Playoffs experience in Season 2, excitement around the Mammoth remains high. And with the team’s hockey operations department looking to start winning soon, fans have even more to look forward to.
“You feel that excitement when your team gets better and better each year as guys start looking around, going, ‘Wow, there’s some talented guys on the ice. I like my role, I like my spot, I’m going to come in better shape and I’m going to push the envelope for our club to be better,’” Utah GM Bill Armstrong said.
Bettman is impressed at how well Utahns have shown up.
“This is a great sports market, whether it’s spectator sports or being a hub for winter sports,” he said. “... The fans have really come to understand and appreciate how special NHL hockey is.”
SEG is not satisfied yet, though.
“As an organization, we have to keep making it thrive,” Smith said. “This is a living thing, and we’ve got to get better every single game. We’ve got to get better every single day.”
