On New Year’s Day, 114,000 fans will fill the University of Michigan football stadium but they won’t be there to root on the Maize and Blue. The Jan. 1 event marks the beginning of six outdoor contests for the National Hockey League this season, stretching from New York City’s Yankee Stadium to Chicago’s Soldier Field and Vancouver’s BC Place to even palm-tree rich Los Angeles. As the NHL fights for attention from U.S. sports fans, the league is hoping the new outdoor tradition, started in 2008, will provide some much needed excitement. And in case the action on the ice isn’t enough, the league is recruiting the Zac Brown Band among others to perform. TIME talked to Don Renzulli, a veteran of past Super Bowl productions and the NHL’s executive vice president of events, about the league’s new strategy. How do you make an NHL event more than just a hockey game? Look at what we are doing with outdoor games; you can do so much more than in a normal arena. We can do anthems, big flags and small kids skating on auxiliary ice. We can bring in entertainment pre-game and during intermissions. We are able to integrate more than just sport, but an entertainment aspect similar to a Super Bowl. Can you make the games appeal to people who aren’t hockey fans? The whole concept behind the outdoor games is that it is how a lot of us learned to skate, outside on ice. We recreated that and set up a small rink that we put little kids on. We are getting the people that are coming to tailgate, like at a football game. We have a spectator plaza that introduces fans to our partners’ products. If they have never taken a slapshot in their life, we put a stick in their hand. We put live music out there. When you get inside you see more of a spectacle than just a regular game. If you are not a big fan, we get you happy by seeing a bandImage may be NSFW.
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