The voice of the Canes pulls back the curtain. Why he’s never missed a home game
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Wade Minter became the Hurricanes public announcer in 2015.
- Minter has announced every Hurricanes home game for 11 years.
- Minter announced the Hurricanes as Eastern Conference Champions last month.
Hours before the puck drops on Carolina Hurricanes game days, Wade Minter starts getting into character.
After 11 years as the Hurricanes’ public announcer, it’s a ritual he knows by heart.
First, he puts on his red Hurricanes jersey — his name across his back — picks up a hot coffee at Starbucks and drives to the Lenovo Center while listening to a pregame playlist melding old-school hip-hop with Boygenius and Indigo Girls.
He eats a pregame meal of barbecue with Eastern sauce, coleslaw and sweet tea while reviewing the pronunciations of the night’s players before walking in a clockwise loop around the arena — pausing to say hi to fans and take pictures — and making his way back to the press box.
Then, it’s time for Minter to take his seat as the voice of the Carolina Hurricanes.
“The script has been fairly consistent over the past 11 years,” Minter said. “There’s certain rhythms I just know how to get into. When I’m up here with just the microphone, and no one knows what I look like, I’m in that mode, and I can hopefully put on a good show.”
How did Wade Minter become Canes’ PA man?
Minter has narrated the wins and losses of the Hurricanes since 2015, from announcing the team’s starting lineup at every game to ringing in its Eastern Conference Final win to a crowd of screaming fans.
To him that personality is almost fictitious — a part he says he’s been playing since his early days as an improv comedian — ironically, playing a sports announcer. But after more than a decade in the PA seat, Minter’s trademark growling shouts have become a mainstay for the Hurricanes fan base – with fans singing along with his musical yells during games and mimicking him off the ice.
“There’s a lot of that character still in what I do,” he said. “My training in improv has really allowed me to do some really cool moments where I see an opportunity to make things fun or funny or heighten them, and I can go for it.”
By day, the Wake Forest resident works as a tech executive for Suggestion Ox, an anonymous HR feedback platform he founded in 2015. But by night, he’s back in the press box, delivering his rallying cries between each period — a side of his life that he says many of his co-workers don’t know much about.
“The circles intersect to some degree, but a lot of people who know me from the tech or business world don’t know anything about the hockey, and vice versa,” Minter said.
But despite his role as a centerpiece of Hurricanes culture, Minter isn’t a native North Carolinian. And he said he only started watching hockey after moving to the Raleigh area in 1999, a few years after graduating from college at William & Mary.
The Canes moved to the Lenovo Center just months after Minter came to town — both he and the team newcomers to the Triangle. It didn’t take long for him to become enamored, he said.
“I didn’t know a lot about hockey, but there was a team coming, and my friends were excited about it,” he said. “So I fell in love with the sport very quickly, because it’s an easy sport to love.”
Comedian, hockey player, announcer
In the years that followed, Minter started playing adult recreational hockey and tried on handfuls of roles adjacent to athletics, like becoming a ring announcer for the Raleigh-based comedic wrestling group GOUGE Wrestling and working as the PA for the N.C. State club hockey team for more than 10 years.
He tried out to become the Canes’ announcer in 2015 and got the job shortly thereafter.
Since then, Minter said he hasn’t missed a single home game. He’s sat behind a microphone for the past 505 matchups, forgoing sick days and personal engagements to carry fans through the highs and lows of the past 11 seasons.
“I’ve always thought that if I miss a game, they’re gonna find somebody better,” he said. “So the way I don’t let that happen is I don’t miss a game.”
In recent years, Minter has started to pull back the curtain, filming videos of himself announcing the game from the press box to allow fans to put a face to the famous, booming voice and let them in on the performance. And he’s made a tradition of handing out pages from his scripts to fans as a keepsake from the game.
But there’s one script that Minter couldn’t help but keep for himself.
It’s the page he gripped while announcing the Hurricanes as the Eastern Conference champions last month — something he’d read twice before, but always for the opposing team. That page now hangs in his office, he said.
“We’ve been so close, so many times and come away with nothing,” he said. “This team has been so good, and they’ve gotten so close and have not been able to make it over that hump. You wonder if a curse has been put on you, like what’s going on?”
“But being able to say the Carolina Hurricanes are the Eastern Conference champions for the first time since it happened in 2006 — that meant a lot to me,” he added.
Now, Minter is crossing his fingers for one more goal — announcing the team as the Stanley Cup champion.
“If I get the opportunity to say that, I’ll shut off the part of my brain that’s probably freaking out and I’ll do my job,” he said. “And when the microphone is off and the talking is done, I’ll probably sob because it doesn’t get better than that.”
