Shop fans set on medium speed swirl dust inside the Moorhead Youth Hockey Ice Arena. 

Construction equipment stands silently on concrete flooring, replacing the normally frozen sheets of ice that host the nearly 60 teams in the Spuds’ youth program. 

Amidst the quiet and the stillness, a smattering of Moorhead youth players enters the building, announcing their pleasure with the changes already being made. They fantasize about lighting up the new scoreboards, horsing around in the sparkling locker rooms, and plainly claim the facility as their own. 

The town of Moorhead and the Spuds wouldn’t have it any other way. 

“That’s one of the reasons we decided to stay in this facility,” Moorhead Youth Hockey Executive Director Rob Gramer said on Monday afternoon, just before he and a collection of donors and dignitaries broke ground on the facility’s third sheet of ice. “We wanted to use this facility that is clearly a youth hockey facility,” Gramer continued. “It’s not an event center.”

The Cullen Hockey Center will be the new home of the hockey power nestled on the western edge of the state, featuring the aforementioned three rinks, a repaired roof, new refrigeration system, and much more flexibility when it comes to practices, games, and tournaments.

The maintenance upgrades are part of Phase I of the overall plan, along with updated WiFi capabilities. The third rink is part of Phase II.  

“Even our Mites and Termite ages, they’re on the ice with thirty-five to fifty kids per ice session,” Gramer explained. “We should be able to relieve the stress of having less kids to get a better number for practice sessions and not have to rotate so many teams through.”

The third ice sheet will be named after longtime and legendary rink manager Dennis Bushy, who won USA Hockey’s William Thayer Tutt Award in 2017 for his service. The decision to name the rink after Bushy was not made by anyone in the Moorhead association, but rather by one of the center’s donors, Steve Scheel, CEO of the Scheels Sporting Goods franchise. 

“As Mr. Scheel spoke during the groundbreaking, that was his idea,” Gramer said. “They came up with a way to get us a million dollars and (earned naming rights) to two of the rinks, and he wanted to honor Mr. Bushy’s contributions to our hockey program and the community over time.”

Also on hand for the ceremony were former Moorhead High School boys head coach Terry Cullen, and three-time Stanley Cup-winning former Spud Matt Cullen, who said that Moorhead is a unique place.

“I’ve played a lot of places,” Cullen said during the ceremony. “And (I’ve) never seen anything quite like this.”