DALLAS — North Texas has a habit of catching hockey fever when the Dallas Stars are on a playoff run.
However, their opponent, the Seattle Kraken, has a new team and a fanbase embracing the playoff fever for the first time since entering the league in 2021.
Thirty years ago, the Stars and Dallas-Fort Worth experienced a similar honeymoon; and though the franchise is now a significant and beloved part of the local sports scene, the real contribution and impact is happening beyond the American Airlines Center.
“Youth hockey in Dallas has never been better,” said Stars President and CEO Brad Alberts.
In March of 1993, owner Norm Green stood at Dallas City Hall and announced he would be moving the Minnesota North Stars to the Lone Star State.
“It is the beginning of developing a winner that Dallas is going to be proud of and Dallas is used to seeing,” Green told the council.
Seven months later, the Stars played the first NHL regular season game ever held in the state of Texas at Reunion Arena before a packed crowd that included future governor and president George W. Bush. They defeated the Detroit Red Wings, 6-4, in the opener and would reach the second round of the playoffs in their inaugural year.
Over the next three decades, there would be highs (a Stanley Cup victory in 1999) and lows (a bankruptcy filing in 2011) but the biggest impact of the team’s relocation to Dallas is increased opportunity to play the game at all levels.
“I look back now and we were like a startup,” said Alberts. “Now, our market and our organization is all mature. Even when we won the cup in 1999, we weren’t mature.”
That maturity includes a developmental program that not only helped build eight StarCenter locations across North Texas housing 15 hockey rinks but is also producing talent good enough to play professionally. There are a handful of NHL players raised and reared in the D-FW area, something unheard of until the Stars and the sport of hockey took root.
“We contribute high end talent flowing into US colleges, youth programs and ultimately the professional ranks,” Alberts said.
Alberts said constructing rinks and making the game available and financially affordable to young players and their families was a key part of the growth. Though nobody will ever mistake the volume of hockey talent in D-FW for Canada, the area is quickly accelerating how much talent they produce in the United States.
“Our numbers and growth rate rival any market in the USA Hockey footprint,” Alberts said.
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