Nationwide Arena
Where the Buckeye State found its hockey home in 2000 and never let go.
Nationwide Arena is the home ice of the Columbus Blue Jackets, the NHL expansion franchise that first laced up its skates in the 2000–01 season. Situated in the downtown Columbus, Ohio corridor, the multi-purpose indoor arena has been the beating heart of professional hockey in the Buckeye State for more than two decades, hosting everything from regular-season grinds to Stanley Cup Playoff nights that send the surrounding streets into a roar.
The venue is also the home ground of the Columbus Crew in Major League Soccer, and its flexible bowl configuration allows it to host concerts, college basketball, and major corporate events. The naming rights belong to Nationwide Insurance, a long-standing Columbus-headquartered company whose brand has been woven into the city's identity for generations.
- Location
- Columbus, Ohio (downtown / Short North corridor)
- Opened
- 2000
- Primary tenants
- Columbus Blue Jackets (NHL); Columbus Crew (MLS)
- Naming rights holder
- Nationwide Insurance
- Type
- Multi-purpose indoor arena
- Approximate hockey capacity
- ~20,000
Lore & Background
When the NHL granted Columbus an expansion franchise in 1997, the city scrambled to deliver a venue worthy of a new NHL team. Nationwide Arena rose in time for the 2000–01 season, and the Blue Jackets' very first home game was played inside its still-new concrete and steel. That inaugural night—October 2000—carried the electricity of a city discovering that it now had a professional hockey team, and the arena became the stage on which that identity was forged.
Over the years the building has absorbed the full arc of a young franchise: the early-season optimism of a market eager to believe, the long stretches of rebuilding where the crowd thinned to a loyal core, and the electric Playoff nights that reminded everyone why they had stayed. The blue-and-red banners, the painted faces in the lower bowl, the particular hush that falls over the crowd before a face-off—these rituals accumulated in Nationwide Arena's air like layers of paint, making the space feel less like a building and more like a living room for an entire region.
The arena's dual-tenancy with the Columbus Crew gave Columbus a rare gift: a single address where the city's two major professional teams could share a home. On nights when a hockey game and a soccer match were scheduled close together, the arena's corridors buzzed with a cross-pollination of fan culture, and the building became a genuine civic commons rather than a single-sport temple.
In Their Own Story
The November air outside tastes like wet concrete and diesel. You push through the glass doors and the temperature hits you like a wall—warm, loud, smelling of hot dogs and the faint ozone tang of the Zamboni's fresh cut. The lower bowl is a sea of blue and red, and someone three rows up is already doing the shoulder-bump chant, off-beat, and the whole section catches it like a wave. The ice gleams under the high-bay lights, a white rectangle in a dark cathedral, and you can see the faint blue lines, the center face-off circle, the small black puck sitting dead-center like a period at the end of a sentence. The puck drops. Sticks crack. The sound is enormous and immediate, and for a few minutes the rest of the world—your phone, your commute, the gray Ohio sky you walked through—simply does not exist. There is only the arena, the crowd, and the next shift.
Reader's Guide
Walk into Nationwide Arena on a Blue Jackets home night and you will notice the layout immediately: a steep, intimate bowl that pulls the crowd close to the glass. The lower rows are where the die-hards live—season-ticket holders, the painted-face regulars, the families who have attended every home game since 2001. The upper deck holds the broader crowd, the game-day tourists, the people who came for the atmosphere as much as the puck.
The tradition that matters most is the pre-game walk-around. Before the puck drops, the home team skates the perimeter while the crowd stands, and in Columbus that moment carries a weight that goes beyond ritual. It is the city saying, *we are here, we chose this, we are not going anywhere.*
The concourse culture is its own thing. The Nationwide branding is everywhere, but the real identity lives in the fan-made signs, the hand-drawn banners strung between the upper-deck railings, the small vendors selling hand-painted face masks in the colors of the current season. It is not a polished corporate experience. It is a neighborhood that happens to be inside a building.
If you go, go to the lower bowl. Bring a friend. Stay for the last face-off. That is the whole point.
Did You Know?
- Nationwide Arena opened in time for the Blue Jackets' 2000–01 inaugural NHL season, meaning the building and the franchise essentially arrived in the city at the same moment.
- The arena is a dual-sport home, hosting both the NHL's Columbus Blue Jackets and the MLS's Columbus Crew, making it one of the few indoor venues in the country to anchor two major professional teams.
- The naming-rights sponsor, Nationwide Insurance, is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, tying the arena's identity directly to a company built in the same city it serves.
- Because the arena is multi-purpose, the seating configuration shifts between hockey, soccer, and event modes, meaning the crowd's relationship to the ice changes with every reconfiguration.