Kelowna Rockets
Rink: Prospera Place
Capacity: 6,286
Built: 1999
League: WHL
City: Kelowna, British Columbia
Home Of: Kelowna Rockets
Games Attended: 1
Only Game: March 6, 2024 vs Tri-City
Unique Arena: #84
WHL Arena: #18
Prospera Place sits in the middle of one of the most gorgeous settings I can think of across the CHL. It sits just adjacent to the edge of Okanagan Lake that runs down the middle of Kelowna. Technically, the east side of the lake is Kelowna proper while the west side is another town itself known as West Kelowna. Regardless of semantics, the valley that Kelowna sits in is one of the more picturesque areas in the CHL. Prospera Place itself is a mid-sized building with what felt like no real main grand entrance to speak of, but rather several gates of access. It has several restaurants and hotels within walking distance, and despite not looking like the biggest arena around it doesn’t actually hide underground at all, as ice level is street level.
Once entering Prospera Place you find yourself in a very wide concourse on ice level that runs 360 degrees around the building, though there can be some restricted access on the concourse behind the benches, as the Rockets need to walk across it to get to the ice from their dressing room. Even though the concourse extends around the entire building, it feels like only half of it is really used as all of the concession stands, most bathrooms and the team store are all located on the penalty box side, around the end that the Rockets defend twice. The bench side is a very wide corridor that is thankfully painted in Rockets colours and has paintings of Rockets NHL alumni on the walls. But otherwise, this arena of the concourse is pretty much wasted space. The visitors don’t need to cross the concourse as their dressing room is under the stands.
With the concourse being at ice and street level, access points to the seating bowl require going up a flight of stairs at each entrance much like the ones in Seattle and Kingston.
Prospera Place is one of the many clone rinks that dot the entire span of the CHL. While it doesn’t have the concourse at the top of the bowl like many other clones, it has a very similar set up to rinks like Mississauga, Kingston and Victoria. It has about 5,500 seats (with plenty of standing room at the top of the bowl in one end), with a bowl that isn’t too steep, but it’s not too shallow and allows for good views of the ice. It has club seats on the penalty box side (though truth be told they didn’t seem any comfier than the rest of the seats when I tried them), and it has suites running down both sides of the rink with a restaurant at the top of the bowl in one end. The first two rows of seats below the restaurant are more club-style seats. The press box sits high up in the rafters on the penalty box side.
One thing I liked about Prospera Place is not just that it has a nice arched roof, but that the roof trusses follow the arch all the way across. Lately, however, Kelowna has been getting some flak about the need for upgrades. The rink was built in 1999, and it feels like nothing has really been upgraded since then. As a fan, the most outdated thing is the dot matrix scoreboard that has some burnt out bulbs on it, and it can be a little hard to read at times. A newer set of HD videoboards has been slapped on at the top of the original board, but the screens are a tad too small for a building of this size. Another sore spot as a fan is the sound system, which sounded very garbled and made it tough to listen to announcements. Thankfully they don’t play music very loudly in Kelowna. In fact, it’s played super quiet. Those issues were just based on my experience attending a game there in March of 2024. Since then, the arena has undergone some renovations in anticipation of hosting the 2026 Memorial Cup tournament after the team lost out on the tournament they were supposed to host in 2020, before COVID put the entire world on hiatus for a while. The worst scoreboard in the CHL has been upgraded to a top notch all HD video scoreboard. I can’t speak for the sound system issues I talked about above, but one would hope that was fixed as well. I look forward to seeing the fixes in person at the Memorial Cup in 2026.
Kelowna it is not a bad experience as a CHL fan. It’s just a very middle of the road experience. It’s a mid-sized clone rink that is comfortable enough and has a good fan base that for my game on a Wednesday night came out in impressive numbers. They weren’t overly rowdy, though. The game presentation could be better but that will come with a new audio/visual experience as I said has been upgraded since my visit.
