The new Sports and Recreation Complex at UNH Durham campus will be called The
Whittemore Center. The former Snivley Arena now a three level recreation
facility will still be known as Snively. The Hockey rink will be called Towse
Rink.
The complex is named for Frederick B. Whittemore who donated $1.5 million.
The Whittemore School of Business at UNH is named for his father, neither of
 whom went to UNH. Robert Collins Towse whom the Rink is named for donated
$500,000. He is a colleague of F.B. Whittemore. He played Hockey at UNH in
the early sixties.
The Whittemore family helped found the N.H. town of Pembroke in 1732.  The
elder Whittemore was a UNH trustee from 1954-1960.
The new hockey rink is attached to the end of the old Snively Arena. A lobby
between the buildings will serve both facilities. You leave the lobby area
and enter the rink at the top of the seating onto a wide concourse. The press
box is part of the concourse and takes up a few of the top rows of seats at
center ice. The rink has 6,000 seats arranged symetrically  around the
200'x100' ice surface. There are 17 rows of seats, in 24 sections. The
building is very much like Marriucci Arena just a few less rows of seats.
It has been said that this project should have taken 18 to 20 months to
complete. The first Hockey game was played and the first student used the
rec. center in only 13 months. Although there is still a lot of outside work
to be done, when the puck drops no one seems to care. In order to open the
building they literally paved a temporary side walk to the front door just
hours before the ribbon cutting ceremony. Tempoary lights on generators lit
the way as men and women in hard hats scurried about. As I sold 50/50 tickets
before the game I looked out onto the ice, it looked and felt more like a
East Regional setting , it was hard to believe I was actually in little old
Durham N.H. If not for the smell of the cow manure I would of sworn I was
somewhere else.  Before the game we raised a glass for old Snively in fond
remembrance and in hope the new place will some day mean as much to
generations to come as Snively did to us.
Student ticket alottment has increased from 1600 to 2100. I was at the field
house today a line of about 250 students, waiting to get tickets to the
Merrimack game stretched the lenght of the lobby it had been like that all
day long.
 
The more things change the more they seem to stay the same!
 
GO UNH!  MOWERS FOR HOBEY BAKER!
 
HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey;  send information to
[log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.