Some of the biggest names in Minnesota sports could take a lesson on facility-building and fundraising from the Minnetonka Youth Hockey Association.

The Minnetonka community is in the process of constructing an expansion to Pagel Ice Arena, and according to association president Jim van Bergen, they’re doing it without a dime of tax money.

“Entirely funded by donors, by individual contributions and fundraising,” van Bergen said of the expansion, adding that the entire project’s cost will be approximately $9 million. “We didn’t get any money from the school district or taxpayers for our program,” van Bergen said.

Instead, the association has relied on donations of all sizes, and on the fundraising acumen of youth hockey parents, which is unrivaled.

“We had kids that donated five dollars, and we had families that did a thousand,” van Bergen said. “We had a number of teams organize fundraising events, including door-to-door visits by players in jerseys to a Skate-a-Thon as memorable experiences.”

The youth association has experienced incredible growth in the last decade, a fact van Bergen says makes the additional facility more than necessary.

“We’ve got (close to) 900 kids in our program, and that’s a lot of teams that need to be on the ice,” van Bergen said.

The actual number of registered players at all levels in the MYHA is 879, a 29 percent increase over the last 12 years. Aside from the growth, van Bergen says that a key goal of the association is to retain players throughout the youth program and more recently, through high school.

“We want to provide opportunities for as many kids to play as long as they can,” van Bergen said. “We’ve seen some awesome growth in our Junior Gold program.”

For those unfamiliar, Junior Gold is the association option for players who do not make, or do not wish to play for, their high school team. With the number of players enrolled in the youth program, and with a perennial power at both boys and girls high school levels, Minnetonka supports an Under-19 team for girls, and five Junior Gold teams for boys.

The large numbers for Minnetonka puts a premium on ice time, and teams at various levels in the association have fanned out across the metro to find spaces to practice.

“We rent heavily from any rink we can within a 25-mile radius,” van Bergen said, drawing on his own experiences as a hockey parent. “Last year between my three kids we skated everywhere from Waconia, Mound, the University of Minnesota (Mariucci Arena) and Bloomington.”

With another local sheet of ice, van Bergen hopes to eliminate some of those long drives and hassle-riddled travel that pushes some families away from the sport. 

The expansion is being built next door to the established Pagel Arena, which will allow the high school teams from Minnetonka to make use of it.

“To keep it as a part of our high school campus so the boys’ and girls’ high school teams can use it as well made the most sense from an infrastructure standpoint and from a lack of land,” van Bergen explained, further adding that the proximity means that the facilities can share staff, another way the fundraising team has been able to mitigate costs.

Helping offset those said costs are local business, with van Bergen singling out Youngstedt’s, Lifetime Fitness, Great Clips and Impact Hockey as key sponsors. 

Through all of what constitutes “the process” of building a new arena - the projections, the meetings, the haggling, the problem-solving and the exhaustion - van Bergen is reminded of the ultimate goal in the expansion’s construction. 

“We wanted the kids involved. We wanted the kids to put some skin in the game. It’s their rink,” van Bergen said. “We have a whole bunch of great parents and families and donors making it possible, but it’s all for the kids.”