Icing The ‘Seattle Freeze’

Ashley Arnston was just out of a long-term relationship and hoping to socialize more when volunteering a few seasons ago to sell 50/50 raffle tickets at Kraken home games.

But Arnston never expected she’d eventually travel to Kraken road games alongside other volunteers from the One Roof Foundation 50/50 Raffle, pres. by Washington’s Lottery, she wound up meeting. What began as friendships at Climate Pledge Arena expanded outside the rink to Kraken playoff watch parties, birthday gatherings, and eventually road trips.

“It’s a really great way just to develop friendships and community,” Arnston, 30, who grew up in Shoreline, said of her friend group and others formed amongst the 50/50 volunteers. “I have a few friends from there that I don’t travel with, but I’m always excited to see them. I’m starting to have dinner with one of the other ladies there and it’s just really a solid group of folks.

“It’s a great way to combat the Seattle Freeze.”

The 50/50 raffle has been a hockey constant for decades in arenas worldwide, where half the money collected goes to the night’s winner and the other half to a charity or community group. The Kraken version, which launched in the franchise’s sophomore 2022-23 season, gives half the proceeds to the team and arena’s One Roof Foundation charity arm. The Foundation works to increase access to play for young people across the region. In King County, access to play depends on household income, primary language spoken at home, and zip code but research shows sports benefit young people in many ways – from teaching them about teamwork, resilience, improved mental health and raising self-esteem. The foundation is funding programs including developing sports courts across the region, and providing financial assistance to young people wanting to learn to skate and learn to play. Every $20 raised ORF can fund one child's Learn to Skate lessons.

The program launched in September 2022 during the team’s second season, with Arnston beginning to volunteer that December in the arena’s Modelo Cantina. After a few shifts, she was paired off with another new volunteer, Minnesota native Laurie Feldman, 41, and the pair quickly hit it off.

Not long after, another volunteer, who’d worked with Arnston her very first shift, introduced her to Brandon Cadotte, 32, a Michigan transplant who’d also recently started selling the raffles. Before long, Arnston, Feldman, and Cadotte began being stationed together around the arena, then asked their supervisor whether that could become a more permanent arrangement.

“So, we all just got connected by happenstance and have really started hanging out together a lot more often,” Arnston said.

Arnston and Feldman started hanging out together and then the trio attended some watch parties when the Kraken made the playoffs that season. They later discovered a mutual fondness for attending drag shows and have done that repeatedly at a favored Capitol Hill bar.

Then, last March, Arnston and Feldman, who’d attended Arizona State University, took a trip to Tempe to see the Kraken play the Coyotes.

“That kind of opened it up,” Feldman said. “It was like ‘Oh, we’re good travel buddies.’”

Feldman’s time in Arizona two decades prior had seen her sell 50/50 tickets at Coyotes games, being her Minnesota roots had made her a longstanding hockey fan. She later moved to Seattle to work for the University of Washington and found herself doing more volunteer work for the Special Olympics, Habitat for Humanity, and elsewhere.

So, when the Kraken were formed and launched their own 50/50 draw, the allure for her was more to continue the volunteer work she’d done with the Coyotes rather than seeking out a friendship group.

“I figured if there were enough games for me then there might be people that I became friendly with,” Feldman said. “But not people that I’d see at least a couple of times a week outside of the games.

“With all my other volunteer activities, I’m usually just going there myself and kind of working alone. So, this is totally, 180 degrees opposite of that. It’s been great.”

Feldman and Arnston enjoyed their Arizona road trip so much, that they planned a New York City voyage to see the Kraken play the New Jersey Devils and New York Rangers. When the third member of their trio, Cadotte, heard about that he immediately wanted in.

“Brandon loves New York, so he was like ‘OK, I’m down’,” Feldman said.

Cadotte, despite his Michigan roots, had never been much of a hockey fan before volunteering for the 50/50 raffle at Kraken games.

“I heard about it through my friend who had done it and the One Roof Foundation is a good cause, so I wanted to help out any way I could which is by volunteering,” he said. “I really didn’t go into it expecting to meet the people I would be friends with. I didn’t realize when I signed up that there would be a lot of opportunities to talk to other people who are volunteering.”

But Cadotte, an Amazon software engineer, quickly found that ticket sales -- which start once the arena gates open pregame and continue through the second period – tend to slow once the game is actually taking place.

“You’re not really selling many tickets so, yeah, we’ll usually gather around and talk to each other during that time.”

Beyond helping the “introverted” Cadotte make new friends, the 50/50 volunteering has also made him more of a hockey fan.

“Now, I actually like to go to the games,” he said. “I probably go to more games that I pay to go see now than the ones I volunteer at. Whereas before, it was the other way around and I’d volunteer for more games than I’d pay to see.”

The trio is looking forward to their next Kraken road trip, to Vancouver in early April to see them play the Canucks.

And Arnston said she knows of other friend groups among volunteers that have similarly traveled together. She’d gotten into hockey years back when her boss took employees to see a Seattle Thunderbirds junior game and quickly became a Kraken fan after their October 2021 launch.

But after her breakup, she found none of her other friends liked the sport. She wanted to keep her hockey ties and “needed to develop a community around it” so she jumped at the 50/50 volunteer work upon seeing an email sign-up for it online.

And wound up finding that hockey community and more.

“It’s just a great way to build friendships,” she said. “And they just keep on building.”