East of Park City along Highway 248 toward Hideout, Black Rock Mountain Resort welcomed its first guests on Valentine’s Day 2021. On this June day we’re standing in the construction site on the hillside beneath the resort at what will be ice level of the new Black Rock Ice Rink with Kevin McCloskey, head of Hockey Operations for the Utah Outliers.

The rink is scheduled to open in December, with the Outliers playing the final dozen home games out of 53 during 2024-25 season in these new Heber City digs. 

Currently, sparks fly overhead and Deer Valley’s East Village peaks fill the vista through the arena’s unfinished western wall as we walk past wet concrete steps and workers in hardhats who acknowledge McCloskey in his Outliers jacket as a familiar presence.

---

---

A boom lift and excavator occupy center rink today while McCloskey points out the future location of a sliding glass door from which the players will enter the rink, Zamboni access and storage on the opposite end near the concessions and main entrance, along with the home team locker room and quarters for up to five more visiting squads, each with its own shower facility.

In the corridor between the hotel and rink, McCloskey notes the future location of the 9,000-square-foot athletic club, with exercise and training facilities to be available for use by Outliers players, Black Rock hotel guests, and the public. The arena roof will be used as parking, along with additional garage lots beyond the main arena entrance.

---

---

Black Rock will be Utah’s first private ice rink, with narrower dimensions lined to National Hockey League standards rather than Olympic measurements currently available at other local locations.

The arena building itself is 134 feet wide by 85 feet long, and seating rings the rink with a close spectator experience in mind. Black Rock stadium will seat over 2,000 hockey fans in surrounding bleachers and an upper deck with table seating. The multi-use stadium will also function as a 3,000-seat concert venue, with a stage ready to be assembled in a few hours on top of the ice.

McCloskey notes the rarity of a venue of this size in the area and enjoys musing about which artists could soon grace the stage, with an interest in partnering with the Park City Songwriters Festival in August and the Sundance Festival, should it remain in Park City.

The Outliers, who take their name from Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book on exceptional success stories, are a tier 2 Junior A hockey team in the National Collegiate Development Conference, which is America’s highest level of North American amateur competition for 16- to 20-year-old male players.

Under general manager and coach Paul Taylor, the team has played its first seven seasons in West Valley’s 1,000-seat Acord Ice Center, a public community rink maintained by Salt Lake County.

Taylor’s former players who are active on NHL rosters include Chicago’s Seth Jones and his brother Caleb Jones on Colorado, Carolina’s Stefan Noesen and Blake Coleman in Calgary.

Last April, a championship game loss to Ogden ended the Outlier’s three-year run as Mountain Division champs. On May 13, the Outliers selected four birth year 2007 prospects in the NCDC draft, along with four older players born in 2006 and 2005.

Their Main Camp will take place at the Park City Ice Arena on July 19-21, when these draft picks and over 100 other invitees, including some local talent, will try out for 26 spots on the Outliers’ opening day roster.

“If you come out, you’re going to see one of our games going on and it’s fun, particularly for the youth hockey players to come out and get a look at something they can strive to be and something they can reach for,” McCloskey says.

Outliers players hail from across America, Canada and Europe and generally play for the Outliers for one to two seasons, competing for opportunities to advance to collegiate and professional hockey. High school-aged students take online courses, and many of the older students study for online college credits, too.

“We had seven kids off our team last year committed to NCAA D3,” McCloskey says.

The Outlier’s Mountain Division opponents include the Pueblo Bulls, Rock Springs Grizzlies, Ogden Mustangs, Provo Predators, Casper Warbirds and Idaho Falls Spud Kings. During the September-April season, players play two games a week, typically on Friday and Saturday evenings, while living with a billet family that hosts a player or two during their stay.

McCloskey equates the player/family experience to foreign exchange students visiting America. The billet program is a unique opportunity for families to experience hosting the visiting Outliers players during the hockey season for a monthly stipend, he says. Many billet families end up participating for multiple seasons.

The Outliers have spent eight years building a network in Salt Lake and are fielding interested billet family applicants in Summit and Wasatch counties, who are encouraged to contact Bill McCloud. 

The Outliers’ move up the mountain is not necessarily tied to the arrival of Salt Lake City’s new Utah Hockey Club. McCloskey says a rink has been in discussion on the Black Rock site since its inception, and Black Rock hotel and residential developer Rich Wolper is the Outliers’ managing partner.

McCloskey notes that many of the Outliers competitors do well in smaller markets closer to Heber and Park City’s size, compared to the exponentially larger Salt Lake City. The Outliers host youth clinics in West Valley and plan to provide similar outreach at Black Rock. 

McCloskey describes how an amateur team provides an accessible fandom for an area in which Park City High School’s Miner’s hockey team reigns as state champion: “You look at London, Ontario, or Kelowna, British Columbia and Kamloops and towns like that. They support those teams like they’re their own. That’s their NHL team, right? And while we’ll have NHL here, and we think that’s fantastic, the geographical divide of going up over Parley’s Summit, I think, separates us from them. And Park City will have their own team.”

Come mid-December, Park City hockey fans will have a chance to cheer on the Outliers as relocation to a higher elevation accompanies their quest to return to the top of the Mountain Division.