SARATOGA SPRINGS — Saratoga Spa State Park will hold the first ever Saratoga Frozen Springs Classic pond hockey tournament, as the kickoff event for the annual Winterfest Week.
The Saratoga Convention & Tourism Bureau and Townsquare Lifestyle Events have put together a 45-team tournament, including players from Massachusetts, that will extend over a three-day span, January 24-26, starting tonight at 6 p.m.
Behind the Gideon Putnam Hotel, on pond rinks adjacent to Catherine’s in the Park, there will be four 40-minute games (two 20-minute periods) going on at a time.
With Labatt Blue as the title sponsor, the four-on-four round-robin style games will be surrounded by the Labatt warming tent, local food trucks, available beverages and entertainment, including the presence of radio stations 104.5 The Team ESPN Radio and Q103 (103.1).
“Even if folks don’t play hockey or want to skate, they can come out and watch,” said President of the Saratoga Convention & Tourism Bureau Todd Garofano. “It’s a great spectator event. There will be lots to see and do.”
Spectators have an opportunity to watch local area stars, former professionals and college players, and anyone else who just wanted to sign up. There will also be opportunities between games for those with skates and kids to go on the ice.
Friday will include a downtown Labatt Blue Pub Crawl, starting at 7 p.m. at Peabody’s. There will be numerous Labatt specials throughout the weekend at various downtown locations, including The Stadium Café and The West Side Stadium. A free shuttle service will also be available to go to and from downtown on Friday and Saturday, starting at the Gideon Putnam Resort, from 6-11 p.m.
On Saturday, the games will start at 10 a.m. and go through 9 p.m., as teams continue to play their guaranteed three games while fighting to be among the top six in their perspective divisions (Gold, Silver, and Bronze). Teams receive three points for a regulation win, two points for an overtime win, one point for an overtime loss and zero points for a regulation loss.
The top six teams from each division on the standings board will advance to a seeded playoff on Sunday. Sunday games start at 10 a.m. with a break at noon before the playoffs start at 1 p.m. The top two seeds in each division will get a bye before getting the chance to compete in one of the championship games, which are set to begin at 5 p.m.
With Labatt being the main sponsor from the start, their preference is to have these types of tournaments on a natural surface. But after realizing Saratoga Lake, Lake Lonely and the ponds around the Saratoga National Golf Club were not freezing to the appropriate thickness for a safe event, the state park was looked into for consideration last year.
With well-known pond hockey tournaments in Lake Placid and Buffalo, Garofano felt Saratoga Springs offered a unique place to contend with some of the best in New York and the Northeast. The idea spurred a couple years ago, but didn’t come to fruition because the weather did not cooperate.
“We really wanted to make it our own,” Garofano said. “Our downtown lends itself well to events like this…Our thought was Saratoga, with downtown as the anchor, would really be a destination for a large-scale pond hockey event.”
“The basis behind this is that Saratoga offers a unique combination of a strong community, a vibrant downtown, a historic history and we have this beautiful state park, so we work closely with the convention tourism bureau and the sports bureau on trying to bring unique events into Saratoga during the offseason,” said Townsquare Lifestyle Events Managing Director AJ Bodden.
Townsquare Lifestyle Events also runs Beer Week and Brewfest and now includes Ashly Emerson, who helps run and coordinate hockey tournaments in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Both Bodden and Garofano are hopeful for the tournament to grow in the coming years.
“Our goal when we start an event is that it’s an annual tradition,” said Bodden, who would like to see the Frozen Classic compete with the likes of the 100-team tournament, held in Buffalo. “We’re really hoping this will be one of the landmark hockey tournaments in the Northeast.”
“For a first-year event to draw 45 teams as far away as Boston, I’m pretty proud,” said Garofano, who added his main goal is to fill the town and get the first tournament under their belt before bringing more people in by word of mouth for future years. “This is more than what I expected. We definitely expect this to grow throughout the years and the park gives us the opportunity to grow.”
Find full details, including the games schedule, rules and information about Friday’s bar crawl at www.saratogafrozenspringsclassic.com.
