Facilities & Arena

Beyond your original training facility, every program can invest in six additional facility tracks: Locker Room, Medicine Center, Recovery Suite, Video Lab, Academic Support, and Student Section. Every program — including a blue-blood — starts with all six unbuilt. Building one is a deliberate first investment, not something you're handed for free.

Six Tracks, Six Trade-Offs

Every track has a cost, an effect, and a catch. None of them is a free stat boost, and none is correct for every program:

• Locker Room lifts team mood — but let it fall too far behind your conference's typical level and it becomes an active drag instead. This one rewards keeping pace with your league, not a one-time build.
• Medicine Center lowers your injury rate and shortens recovery time when injuries do happen.
• Recovery Suite raises how much stamina your roster recovers week to week and further shortens injury recovery time. It's the priciest track in the catalog by a wide margin — out of reach until you're a genuinely strong program.
• Video Lab boosts scheme quality and hands you extra scouting points — but it's wasted money without a capable Assistant Coach already on staff to make use of it. See Support Staff.
• Academic Support nudges draft-eligible underclassmen toward staying in school a little longer and lowers the odds of an academic-eligibility suspension. It has no on-ice effect at all — it's pure retention and risk insurance.
• Student Section boosts your home-ice edge and ticket revenue — but only once you're winning. Investing heavily here while losing is close to money wasted.

Some tracks are also gated by your program's overall tier — a few (Locker Room, Academic Support) are deliberately affordable to build up even at a lower-tier program, while Recovery Suite is priced and gated as a luxury out of reach until you're a strong or elite program.

Rink Dimensions Are a Style Choice

Beyond the six facility tracks, you can also renovate your home rink between three sheet sizes — standard, wide, or Olympic — and it's a playing-style decision, not just cosmetics:

• A standard sheet favors a physical, grinding roster — tighter ice rewards hitting and defending.
• A wide sheet opens up space for skating and passing.
• An Olympic sheet opens the ice further still, clearly favoring speed and puck movement over physicality.

Widening your sheet costs NIL Collective money — a felt sacrifice, not a minor toggle. Narrowing it back down is cheaper, but it costs a prestige hit: a program only shrinks its ice for the lower price tag or a deliberate physical-identity rebuild, not as a free reversal. Whichever way you go, a renovation locks in for five full seasons before you can change it again.

It All Feeds Recruiting, Too

Your built-up facilities factor into how appealing your program looks to a recruit — a modest fifth ingredient alongside your NIL offer, prestige, proximity, and the role you're promising. It's never the deciding factor on its own, but a well-invested program carries a real recruiting edge beyond just money. See Recruiting.

Your overall facilities quality — one blended read across every track — is also visible next to prestige and legacy on your own program summary and every rival's team profile.

Paying For It

Facility spending is paid from Revenue Share, the same wallet that funds your support staff, so a big facilities push and a strong staff compete for the same money. See Finances.

You can only take one build-or-upgrade action per offseason across the entire catalog, so a facilities push means choosing which track matters most right now, not binging on all of them at once. Maintaining what you already own isn't limited that way — you can always pay to restore any facility you own back to full condition whenever you can afford it. A strong Facility Manager on staff slows how fast everything decays in the first place.

See Also

• Support Staff — your Facility Manager and Video Lab's dependence on a capable Assistant Coach
• Finances — where facility spending comes from
• Recruiting — how program appeal factors into a prospect's decision
• Attributes, Archetypes & Ratings — the skater types your rink size favors