Tucson Roadrunners - Tucson Arena

Hockey in Tucson shouldn't work. The desert, the heat, the city's long identity built around the Santa Cruz River valley and centuries of sun — none of it points toward ice. And yet the Tucson Roadrunners have been playing here since the 2016–17 season, relocated from Springfield, Massachusetts, where they operated as the Springfield Falcons before the Arizona Coyotes purchased the franchise and moved it west.

The arena is inside the Tucson Convention Center on West Broadway — a building that opened in 1971 and seats roughly 6,500 for hockey. It is not a cathedral. It is a working arena where players with something to prove spend a season proving it, then move up. That pipeline is the whole point. Lawson Crouse, Conor Garland, Clayton Keller, Matias Maccelli, Barrett Hayton — all of them came through Tucson. Crouse and Garland broke out during the 2017–18 Calder Cup playoff run, the kind of postseason that plants a franchise in a city's memory.

When the Coyotes' hockey operations relocated to Salt Lake City following the 2023–24 season, owner Alex Meruelo kept the Roadrunners in Tucson. The team now develops players for the NHL's Utah Mammoth. The parent club changed; the work didn't.

The 2025–26 season is the franchise's tenth in Tucson. Before it began, the team unveiled new uniforms built around a Kachina-inspired alternate logo — a design that had been secondary to a look more reminiscent of the old World Hockey Association's Phoenix Roadrunners, now brought forward as the primary identity.

The AHL regular season runs October through April. Go for the hockey, stay for what the ice says about a city that wasn't supposed to want it.