Lynah Rink
Based on Wikipedia: Lynah Rink
The Loudest Four Thousand Seats in College Hockey
There's a building in Ithaca, New York, where opposing hockey teams have nightmares. It seats just over four thousand people—roughly the size of a high school gymnasium in some parts of the country—but generates a wall of sound that makes visitors feel like they've stumbled into a stadium ten times larger. Lynah Rink, home to Cornell University's Big Red hockey teams, has witnessed visiting squads lose nearly eighty percent of their games since 1957. That's not a typo. For almost seven decades, teams have traveled to this quonset-shaped arena in the Finger Lakes region and found themselves overwhelmed not just by Cornell's players, but by something far harder to prepare for: the Lynah Faithful.
A Gift Without a Name
The story of how Lynah Rink came to exist involves one of those peculiarly American acts of wealthy eccentricity. Walter S. Carpenter Jr., who had served as chairman of DuPont—one of the largest chemical companies in the world—and graduated from Cornell in 1910, donated five hundred thousand dollars to build the arena. His single condition was delightfully counterintuitive for a major donor: he didn't want his name on the building.
So the university named it after someone else entirely.
James Lynah, pronounced "LIE-nuh," had graduated from Cornell in 1905 and served as the director of athletics from 1935 to 1943. The building was dedicated on April 6, 1957, as the James Lynah Skating Hall—a mouthful that everyone quickly shortened to simply Lynah Rink.
The arena had actually opened a few weeks earlier, on March 21st, with a curious exhibition match. The New York Rangers, a team from the National Hockey League—the highest level of professional hockey in North America—faced off against the Rochester Americans from the American Hockey League, a minor league one step below. Forty-two hundred spectators packed into the brand-new building, likely unaware they were witnessing the birth of what would become one of college hockey's most intimidating venues.
What a Quonset Looks Like
If you've never seen a quonset hut, imagine a structure that looks like someone cut a cylinder in half lengthwise and laid it flat side down on the ground. The design originated during World War Two when the military needed buildings that could be manufactured quickly, shipped anywhere, and assembled by people without construction experience. The distinctive semicircular shape comes from prefabricated steel ribs covered with corrugated metal sheeting.
Lynah Rink takes this functional military form and dresses it up in academic respectability. The exterior features multi-colored brick in shades of orange, tan, black, and brown, arranged in what architects call a common bond pattern—essentially the standard way of laying bricks where each row alternates between showing the long face of the brick and the short end. Projecting from the front of the building is a one-story rectangular wing flanked by two vertical appendages containing multi-paned colored glass windows, giving the entrance area a somewhat ecclesiastical feel.
The building connects to Bartels Hall, Cornell's indoor athletic complex, through a white concrete block structure reinforced with wall buttresses—those angled supports you see on medieval cathedrals, designed to help walls resist the outward pressure of heavy roofs. The whole complex was designed by Van Storch, Evans, and Burkavage, an architecture firm from Waverly, Pennsylvania, and built by Streeter Associates of Elmira, a city about forty miles southwest of Ithaca.
From Ice Rink to International Press Center
Buildings sometimes get drafted into service for purposes their designers never imagined. In 1995, Lynah Rink experienced perhaps its strangest transformation when Lee Teng-hui, the president of Taiwan, visited Cornell to receive an honorary degree. Lee had earned his doctorate at Cornell in 1968, studying agricultural economics, and his return visit became an international diplomatic incident.
At the time, the United States didn't officially recognize Taiwan as an independent country—a policy designed to maintain good relations with mainland China, which considers Taiwan a breakaway province. Allowing a sitting Taiwanese president to visit an American university, even his alma mater, infuriated Beijing. Journalists from around the world descended on Ithaca to cover the story.
Cornell needed a space large enough to accommodate hundreds of reporters with their equipment. Someone looked at Lynah Rink, with its wide-open floor and ample square footage, and saw not a hockey arena but a makeshift media center. Workers wheeled in desktop computers and fax machines—this was 1995, remember, when the internet was barely emerging from academia and news organizations still relied heavily on physical document transmission. For a few surreal days, the ice where future National Hockey League players would practice sat beneath tables covered in telecommunications equipment.
The Names on the Ice
Speaking of future professionals, Lynah Rink has served as a proving ground for some remarkable hockey careers. Ken Dryden, who would go on to become one of the greatest goaltenders in National Hockey League history, played at Cornell from 1966 to 1969. He later won six Stanley Cup championships with the Montreal Canadiens and was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Dryden was also something of an intellectual anomaly in professional sports—he earned a law degree and later wrote several acclaimed books, including "The Game," widely considered one of the finest works ever written about hockey.
Joe Nieuwendyk, another future Hall of Famer, played at Cornell in the mid-1980s before a professional career that included three Stanley Cup victories with three different teams. Matt Moulson, who graduated in 2006, went on to score more than a hundred goals in the NHL.
The women's program has produced Olympic champions. Rebecca Johnston and Brianne Jenner both won gold medals representing Canada in international competition. Digit Murphy, who played at Cornell in the 1980s, became a pioneering figure in women's hockey as both a player and coach.
The Faithful and Their Rituals
But the players, however talented, represent only half of what makes Lynah Rink special. The other half sits in the stands.
The "Lynah Faithful" is the collective name for Cornell's hockey fans, and they've developed a culture as elaborate and self-referential as any religious tradition. Consider the cowbell. At approximately the midpoint of the second period—and only then—a single undergraduate begins ringing a cowbell. This continues through the rest of the game, including overtime if necessary. The identity of the cowbell ringer changes from year to year, passed down like a sacred responsibility.
Why the second period? Why only one cowbell? These questions assume that traditions need logical explanations, which misunderstands how traditions actually work. Someone started doing it, others found it compelling, and now it's simply part of what it means to watch hockey at Cornell.
The Faithful have developed an extensive repertoire of synchronized chants, enough that the university maintains a website cataloging them with explanations of their origins and proper deployment. This serves as a kind of orientation document for incoming students, ensuring that the traditions survive generational turnover. When opposing goalies make saves, when referees make unpopular calls, when visiting players commit penalties—each situation has its prescribed response, performed in thunderous unison by thousands of voices.
After every home game, a ritual unfolds that captures something essential about the relationship between team and crowd. When the opposing team leaves the ice, the Cornell players gather at center ice, raise their sticks toward the stands, and hold them there while the Faithful applaud. This is the Lynah salute, a mutual acknowledgment between athletes and the community that supports them.
The Numbers Don't Lie
Home ice advantage exists in every sport, but at Lynah Rink it takes on statistical absurdity. Since 1957, Cornell has lost fewer than twenty percent of their home games. During the 2002-2003 season, the men's team went 15-0 at Lynah—perfect, undefeated, untouchable. Two years later, they went 15-0-1, with only a single tie preventing another unblemished record.
Postseason play at Lynah has been even more dominant. Since hosting its first playoff game in 1966, Cornell's men's team has compiled a postseason record of 38 wins, 7 losses, and 2 ties in games played at home. In single-elimination games—do or die, one team goes home—they're 14-1. The sole loss came against Providence in 1978, a defeat so anomalous that it becomes more impressive for its rarity.
As of recent years, Cornell was approaching five hundred total wins at Lynah Rink. For context, some Division I hockey programs haven't won five hundred games in their entire history, home and away combined.
The Economics of Devotion
The intensity of Lynah Rink creates a problem familiar to anyone who has ever tried to see a popular concert or sporting event: how do you distribute a finite resource—seats—among people who want them more than supply allows?
For years, Cornell relied on the most primitive allocation mechanism: whoever showed up first got tickets. This meant students literally camping out for days, sleeping in lines that snaked around the athletic complex. Some students wore their ordeal as a badge of honor, sporting t-shirts that read "I did my time in the line."
The system created its own subculture. Friends would hold spots for each other, informal economies of favors developed, and the shared suffering became part of the bonding experience of being Lynah Faithful. But it also created chaos. In 2005, the Athletic Department attempted to improve the process but ended up creating confusion about where students needed to go, resulting in criticism about mismanagement.
The following year, Cornell tried random preselection, essentially a lottery that determined your place in line before you ever showed up. This removed the camping but also eliminated the camaraderie of suffering together.
Then came the swine flu.
During the 2009-2010 season, with H1N1 influenza spreading across college campuses, having students crowd together in lines seemed medically inadvisable. Cornell switched to a pure lottery system, distributing tickets randomly without any waiting required. By 2010, the university had modernized entirely, moving to online ticket sales with priority given to students who had purchased season tickets in previous years.
Renovations and Expansions
A building that opened in 1957 inevitably needs updating. In 2000, Cornell renovated the rink floor and drainage system—the unsexy but essential infrastructure that keeps the ice surface functional. Ice rinks require elaborate systems to maintain proper temperatures and handle the condensation that forms when cold surfaces meet warmer air.
March 2006 brought more ambitious changes. The university added 19,500 square feet to the facility, roughly the size of a small supermarket. The expansion included 464 new seats—bringing total capacity to 4,267—plus upgraded locker rooms for both men's and women's teams, separate facilities for visiting opponents, training rooms, coaches' offices, and a study area where players could work on academics between practices.
A new scoreboard went up, along with preferred seating options that allowed the athletic department to generate additional revenue from donors willing to pay premium prices. Perhaps most importantly for the players' experience, the renovation added a tunnel connecting the locker rooms to the ice surface, allowing teams to emerge dramatically rather than simply walking through the crowd.
What Makes a Hostile Arena
Many arenas claim to be intimidating. Few deliver on that promise the way Lynah Rink does. Part of the effect comes from sheer proximity. With only 4,267 seats, fans sit remarkably close to the action. There's no distant upper deck where noise dissipates into cavernous space. Every chant, every jeer, every roar of approval hits players at close range.
The quonset shape helps too. Sound doesn't escape easily from a curved ceiling; it bounces around, amplifying itself, creating a cocoon of noise. Professional arenas, designed for luxury boxes and corporate sponsorships, often sacrifice acoustics for revenue. Lynah Rink, built in 1957 on a half-million-dollar budget with no luxury boxes and minimal premium seating, maintains the intimate intensity that modern venues engineer away.
But mostly, it's the people. The Lynah Faithful aren't casual fans catching a game between other weekend activities. They're devotees who studied the chant sheets, waited in line for tickets (at least historically), and view each home game as a chance to participate in something larger than themselves. That collective commitment, sustained across generations of students who graduate and are replaced by new initiates trained in the traditions, creates an atmosphere that opposing teams find genuinely unsettling.
The Rivalry That Defines Ivy League Hockey
Cornell's most intense hockey rivalry involves Harvard, another Ivy League school with a strong hockey tradition. The Cornell-Harvard hockey rivalry represents something unusual in American sports: academic institutions that compete at a high level in a sport more commonly associated with Canadian universities and cold-weather state schools.
The Ivy League, that consortium of eight elite northeastern universities, doesn't offer athletic scholarships. Players at Cornell and Harvard are genuine student-athletes in a way that the term has become almost meaningless at schools where football and basketball generate millions in television revenue. Yet both programs consistently produce professionals, win conference championships, and compete in the national tournament.
When Harvard visits Lynah Rink, the Faithful direct their most creative invective at players from Cambridge. The rivalry encompasses class distinctions, regional pride, and decades of competitive history. Cornell fans take particular pleasure in noting that while Harvard students might have higher average SAT scores, they're watching inferior hockey.
A Building and Its Purpose
Lynah Rink sits at coordinates 42°26'45" North, 76°28'39" West, at the southern end of Cayuga Lake in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. In winter, which lasts roughly from October through April in Ithaca, temperatures regularly drop below freezing, and lake-effect snow from Cayuga can dump several feet in a single storm. This is hockey weather, the kind of climate where skating feels natural rather than imported.
The building has served its purpose for nearly seventy years now: housing a sheet of ice, some seats, and the infrastructure that connects athletes to audiences. But somewhere in those seven decades, Lynah Rink became something more than a physical structure. It became a vessel for traditions, a factory for memories, and one of the most reliably hostile environments in college sports.
Walter S. Carpenter Jr. didn't want his name on the building, and he got his wish. James Lynah, the athletics director from an earlier era, received the honor instead. But neither man, watching that first game between the Rangers and the Americans in March 1957, could have anticipated what their collaboration would create: a place where four thousand people reliably make life miserable for visitors, where cowbells ring at precise moments, where sticks are raised in mutual salute, and where the home team almost always wins.