Thompson Arena - Facilities - Dartmouth College Athletics

Thompson Arena

Men's Ice Hockey

Women's Ice Hockey

4 Summer Court, Hanover, NH 03755

Thompson Arena is one of two Dartmouth sports facilities designed by the Italian structural engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, known popularly as the "poet in concrete," in tribute to the buildings he designed for the 1960 Rome Olympics. The arena, named in honor of Rupert C. Thompson Jr. ’28, is located just across South Park Street from Leverone Field House, the other Nervi-designed building.

Built in 1975, the 83,600 square-foot building was dug into the ground and involved the use of 9,500 yards of pre-cast and cast-in-place concrete and 600 tons of reinforced steel. The vaulted ceiling features 1,024 pre-cast, pie-shaped concrete wedges, each weighing one ton, that create an attractive clear-span vault over the ice surface, chair-backed seats for 3,500 spectators and the concourse that has room for 1,000 standees. The ceiling was flawlessly installed wedge by wedge, using a centered metal arch system that traveled on rails.

The press box, located on the north side of the ice, is held up by buttresses extending over the bleachers. Buttresses suspend the arena itself from outside. At the east end of the arena, various banners fly, representing championships won by both the Big Green men’s and women’s hockey teams. The arena also includes a spacious, carpeted dressing room for the men’s and women's teams as well as rooms for the visiting teams, plus two complete training rooms. There is also a press room, storage and skate-sharpening areas, and the William Smoyer '67 Lounge, where post-game receptions are held. One can find numerous individual and team photos in the Smoyer Lounge, displaying the hallowed history of both the Dartmouth men’s and women’s hockey programs.

In its early years, Thompson Arena also served as the home for basketball. The first intercollegiate contest in the facility was not a hockey game, but rather a basketball game on Nov. 22, 1975, three days before the first hockey game. The Dartmouth men’s basketball team won the exhibition game against a team from Yugoslavia.