Rice University adds club hockey while NHL considers Houston expansion

By Jenna Perrone     9/2/25 6:54pm

Is Houston a hockey town? It’s hard to tell.

Professional ice hockey teams have existed in Houston on and off since the creation of the Houston Skippers in 1946, yet the city remains the largest U.S. or Canadian market without an NHL team. Rumors of an NHL expansion to either Houston or Atlanta have proliferated in recent years, but as of last season, commissioner Gary Bettman said expansion is “not a front-burner topic.” 

For two Rice students, however, the answer to the above question is still a resounding yes. 

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David Nyari and Oliver Finlayson founded the Rice Hockey Club earlier this year in an effort to bring an ice hockey team back to Rice for the first time since 1941. Their mission has widespread support among Houston’s hockey community, Nyari said. 

“I got invited on a call with about 30 different hockey organizations in Houston,” said Nyari, a Wiess College sophomore. “When they all heard that hockey was coming to Rice, everybody was very, very excited, and everybody was very adamant on helping us.” 

One such organization is Hockey Day In Houston, an annual event that began in 2024 to celebrate and promote ice hockey in Houston. Hockey Day In Houston shared some of the RHC’s promotional materials on their Facebook page, alongside a message saying they were “excited to share” that they were in contact with the RHC’s founders. 

Prior to this year, Rice’s last involvement with the sport of ice hockey dates back eighty years. From 1933 to 1941, Rice boasted its own ice hockey team, which included such notable players as Louis Girard ’41, writer of the lyrics of the Rice Fight Song, and David Westheimer ’37, who played goalie and went on to become a novelist. The team won its first city league championship in 1941 but dissolved the same year for unknown reasons. 

Since then, Rice students interested in ice hockey have needed to find other outlets for their passion. For Nyari and Finlayson, both of whom grew up playing ice hockey, this outlet was intramural floor hockey. 

“Me and Oliver initially met at the floor hockey tournament that IM sports put on last year,” Nyari said. “From there, I asked him if he would want to help me with starting a hockey club, and we just took it from there.” 

One of the old team’s biggest obstacles was getting their name out there — especially in a city like Houston that, at the time, had no professional ice hockey teams. A 1940 article from Rice’s student magazine claimed “few students even realize[d] the existence of the team.”

Eight decades later, the RHC has attracted plenty of possible athletes, with 15 people filling out their interest form. 

“We’re still looking for a goalie, which is obviously going to be a bit of a bottleneck,” said Finlayson, a Martel College junior. “But we found that growing our Instagram page and getting people filling out the interest form has been pretty easy.” 

In the meantime, Nyari and Finlayson are simply excited to bring broader awareness of ice hockey to Rice.

“I’ve been a hockey player my whole life,” Finlayson said. “David has been, too. So we just both really love the game and bringing it to Rice, especially when other Texas colleges have it right now but we don’t. I think it’s a pretty important thing to do.”

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