I am in a hockey area.. most of these people are not bball fans.. hockey is played on fri-sat nights almost exclusively . you have a huge number of local kids playing hockey who do not go to bball games. Syr being a bball tradition will skew a bit higher but the hockey people are hockey people, they are used to paying 10x as much to have kids play as for other sports. you can be a fball/bball/baseball player and have almost zero out of pocket as a parent.. thats not the way of life for hockey.
yeah you pay for the arena. but its also only 18 scholies to add, 36 if we need to match. a couple million in cost. its much cheaper to rent the arena than to build and support one unless you have other uses for it. a 3-5K hockey barn is pretty cheap to build if they really want to go that route. Hockey kids are used to playing in dim, cheap, old barns. we couldn't support a b10 style 20K bldg so we dont need one.
and all this is assuming that no alumni wants a program and is willing to help.