The OHL Arena Guide - Sarnia Arena, Sarnia Sting

Sarnia Arena was built in 1948 and is the platonic ideal of the old community barn. It's located in a residential area adjacent to Sarnia's downtown. The arena hosted the Sarnia Sting for four years in the mid-90's, but one of the conditions of allowing the Newmarket Royals to move to Sarnia in the first place was that the Sarnia Arena be only a temporary home for the Sting while a new arena was being constructed. When Progressive Auto Sales Arena was finished, the Sarnia Arena went back to its position as an old-style community rink, home to minor hockey and Junior B.

From the outside, the Arena has the classic profile of a postwar arena, looking much like a barn, with tan brick and blue siding. Once inside the main door, the lobby has a snack bar and a few amenities, but surprisingly, there's no lower concourse. The front lobby is it. You then walk upstairs and into the top of the arena bowl, and a grand old rink opens in front of you. The whole arena is painted in shades of blue, with sky-blue walls and navy-blue trim. The ceiling is high and the seats are comfortable, and there is a new modern scoreclock hanging over centre ice.

I went to Sarnia Arena once, in 2004, to check the place out for this website, then didn't return for twenty-one years. In that time, the arena was comprehensively renovated twice, with the lobby being fully redone and the seats replaced, and in 2022 the rink was renamed Pat Stapleton Arena in honour of the recently-deceased Sarnia-born NHLer. Once I decided in 2025 to start checking out the arenas of the GOHL for games, Sarnia was always near the top of my wish list as a former OHL barn, and I made it to a Legionnaires game in October of that year.

Unfortunately, the fact that Junior B always suffers in OHL markets coupled with the Legionnaires' decade of futility on-ice meant that only a few hundred people were in attendance on the night, and the atmosphere was pretty dead. In my experience with provincial junior so far, Sarnia definitely felt like the most Mom 'n' Pop operation, and it was the first one to fail the "Feels like a Big Deal" test. Although the Arena was only used by the Sting for four seasons, it really made me wish that somehow I'd been able to attend an OHL game there. The Arena back then had a reputation as being one of the hardest rinks in which to play in the league due to the small ice, the closeness of the fans and the raucous, rowdy atmosphere, with basically every game sold out. It was a big stretch to connect that experience with that of seeing the Legionnaires get blown out on home ice in front of a couple hundred people, but I'm still glad I made it to a game there.