He has one of the most recognizable voices at PNC Arena, but it’s the license plate you’ll notice first. The Prius with the Carolina Hurricanes plate that simply says “P.A.”? Why yes, to answer your question, that is indeed Wade Minter behind the wheel.
“It’s the one indulgence I allow myself,” Minter quips.
Halfway through his second season behind the microphone at Hurricanes games, Minter is, in his words, “a bit of an oddball”: of the thirty-plus NHL public address announcers, to his knowledge he is the only one who isn’t a full-time radio, TV or voice professional. A software developer and product manager by trade who didn’t exactly grow up in hockey, Minter at first seems an odd choice to serve as the Canes’ PA announcer.
But that undersells the experience he brings to the scorer’s table. A season ticket holder and proud denizen of section 328 since 1999 prior to moving downstairs, Minter has seen everything on the PNC ice. He’s been speaking in public settings for various events since middle school.
And he’s committed: upon taking a job at a new company a couple of years ago, around the time he joined the Hurricanes game-night staff, he had only two conditions. One, that he wouldn’t have to move his family to Minneapolis, where the company is headquartered. And two?
“No traveling on Hurricanes game days.”
Life as Mr. Voice
If you attended a show at ComedyWorx, or its predecessor ComedySportz, anytime in the fifteen years between 1999 and 2014, chances are you were a party to Wade’s work even if you didn’t know it. For most of that time, Minter was “Mr. Voice,” the otherwise nameless, unseen announcer of the troupe’s improv comedy shows.
“The announcer improvs along with everyone else, just from the back of the house over the microphone,” Minter says. “I gravitated toward that role. It was a quasi-DJ and PA announcer, but having to react very quickly to everything going on in the show.”
It’s an unorthodox path to an NHL scorer’s box from improv shows, to be sure, but it gave Minter the chance to develop the thinking on his feet that he’d need in his at-the-time unknown future career.
In the summer of 2014, the N.C. State club hockey team was looking for an announcer-slash-DJ for their games at the IcePlex in north Raleigh. “I was hanging out on the Twitters, and saw that [NCSU] could use a PA announcer,” Minter says. “I wrote back and said ‘hey, I’ve done a lot of stuff with ComedySportz, I’ll give it a shot.’ They said great, come do a game with us.
“So I treated it like a comedy show: I had my laptop, my music, I built goal songs, and all that.”
Suddenly, worlds were colliding for Minter. He had the production and show experience from his years in comedy. He had the knowledge of the game of hockey, both as a spectator and as a beer-league regular. But what he didn’t know, and what he learned from calling State hockey, was the mechanics of the event itself.
“Working with State was how I figured out how to call a game, from a PA perspective,” he explains. “What do you need to do to be prepared when they radio the numbers to you? How do you announce a bunch of penalties at once? So that was the training ground.”
A New Door Opens
In the summer of 2015, the Canes were looking for a new PA announcer. Longtime voice Brian Hoyle was stepping away to focus on other responsibilities away from the team, and Minter found out about the opening relatively late in the process. He auditioned, and was invited back to work a preseason game against the Penguins.
But of the 7,986 in attendance that night, 7,983 had no idea who was behind the microphone when they walked into PNC Arena that night.
“I didn’t tell a soul, except for my wife and kids,” Minter says. “I bought them tickets to the game and told them ‘you need to be at this game, because who knows if you’ll ever see this again.’”
This being preseason, certain things weren’t working correctly - like the penalty clock. In the second period, a Penguins player called over to Minter asking how much more time was on his penalty. Minter answered, then noticed who had asked.
Sidney Crosby.
Welcome to the NHL, rookie. Nervous much?
“Honestly, I wasn’t as nervous as I thought I’d be, because in a lot of ways it’s a lot simpler than State’s: I have one job instead of three,” Minter says.
After the game, returning upstairs to the family and the few of his friends who were still in the arena - none of whom still had any idea that Minter was calling the game until they were told - he got kudos for his performance.
The Hurricanes clearly felt the same way. The game was Friday night. CanesVision head honcho Chris Greenley offered Minter the job on Monday.
In a year, Minter had gone from never having called a hockey game before to a member of an exclusive fraternity.
A Short but Circuitous Route to Raleigh
What’s ironic about Minter getting the Hurricanes job, of all teams, is that he grew up in a place where hockey was little more than a passing fancy from places nowhere near there - but was less than than two hours from Raleigh.
Welcome to Kenbridge, Va., population 1,233.
“It has a sign on I-85 in South Hill - but only going north,” says Minter.
The only skating in Kenbridge was at the local roller skating rink. In fact, Minter had seen a grand total of one NHL game in person before moving to Raleigh in 1999 - and it was a Caps preseason game, so not even one that counted in the standings - and had only rarely been to Raleigh at all before then. Southern Virginia tends to trend toward Richmond as the main “big-city” draw, and Minter spent plenty of time north of Kenbridge, but never went down across the state line.
His public speaking career took off in 7th grade, when he was selected for the school forensics team - “not the crime scene investigation,” Minter is quick to point out. From then on, he read stories, monologues, and dabbled in other bits of public speaking.
After graduating from William and Mary, where Minter built the first sports-information website for the Tribe athletic department, he moved north, taking jobs as a systems administrator along the way.
“I bounced around the Northeast for a few years - Richmond, DC, Philly - and decided I wanted to go to somewhere reasonably close, and a place that had a tech scene,” he says.
Raleigh checked all the boxes. Minter moved south sight unseen.
But he needed a hobby, so he joined ComedySportz. That led to him meeting a group of friends that eventually became the backbone of the Section 328 collective, and off he went into hockey fandom.
Making A Cameo on SportsCenter
If you had told Minter as a kid that his public speaking chops would have led him to a spot on ESPN one day, he likely would have laughed you out of the room.
Yet last year, as part of the Canes’ alumni fantasy game, that’s exactly what happened.
[HIGHLIGHT] #Canes PA announcer @minter scored a goal in the #CanesAlumni Game, then took the mic to do his job.https://t.co/TjhI3i27vA
— Carolina Hurricanes (@NHLCanes) February 14, 2016
While it may have looked spontaneous, it wasn’t completely. Minter, who plays defense on his rec league teams, had thought “ha ha, wouldn't it be funny if I scored and announced my own goal?”
The joke? Minter never scores goals. His goal in the alumni game was the one goal he scored, in any competition, in 2016.
“I’m playing with people way over my talent level,” he self-deprecatingly admits. “Never in a million years did I think I was going to score. But then Glen Wesley makes it so that my cat could have scored that goal.”
And off he went to the scorer’s table, where John Forslund was calling the game over the PNC PA system.
“Jon Chase saw me coming and took the mic from Forslund,” Minter says. “It was at the end of a two-minute shift. I was so winded. But it happened. People wrote about it, it was hilarious, I made FoxSports.com, the Score in Canada, SportsCenter. Ron the Ref gave me the puck.
“It was a culmination of a dream come true. I didn’t get any special dispensation for being the team’s PA announcer. I paid my way in as a fan.”
Making The Role His Own
About halfway through his first season, Minter says, he started to get the hang of the PA gig. He knew the flow, understood what went where during games, and built a Twitter following off his catch phrases and features.
One of those features could have led to a bit of a flap with, of all people, Anaheim Ducks fans. Phil Hulett, the Ducks’ PA man, calls Ducks goals with the elongated “goooooooooal” that’s familiar to anyone who’s ever heard Minter call a Hurricanes goal.
So, Wade, did you rip off another PA guy?
“I did not, though the similarities are super spooky,” he says. “I was watching an Anaheim game recently and I heard him call a goal and I was like ‘wow, that call sounds just like mine.
“I was searching on Twitter, and there was somebody in Anaheim who posted ‘The Canes guy’s totally ripping off Hulett!’ I didn’t base mine off of his. It was something that I thought sounded good - but yes, they’re super similar.”
A new feature is the away goal calls, posted as a short video on Twitter. Minter said those started when a Canes player - he doesn’t remember who - hit a milestone on the road, and he wanted to commemorate the occasion the way he would have if it had happened at home.
It’s quickly become a cult favorite, even to the extent of calling them when he’s in a hotel room somewhere. That’s dedication right there.
Which brings us to the most familiar of Minter’s quasi-memes: Avicii Cat.
“I knew about Keyboard Cat, because a friend of mine in DC and I like to talk about internet absurdity,” Minter says, with the pride that comes with a long history of participation in internet wackiness. “One of our long-running jokes was ‘play them off, keyboard cat,’ which is a video of a cat in a shirt playing a Casio keyboard. It’s weird, and I love weird.
“At some point last year, I noticed that the synth track of Avicii’s ‘The Nights,’ which we use for our goal song, sounds like someone’s playing it on a keyboard — it sounds like Keyboard Cat. So I opened up iMovie one day and took the Keyboard Cat movie and the track from ‘The Nights,’ synced them up, and it synced up really well.
“I started posting it, a few people liked it, and it went from there. Now it’s at the point where, if I’m not right there a couple of minutes after the game ends, people are like ‘where’s Avicii Cat?’”
When asked what he’s the most proud of in his year-plus behind the Hurricanes’ microphone, Minter hesitates. To him, the job is a labor of love; simply having the job in the first place is enough to be proud of.
Eventually, he finds an answer. “I have been able to find the little things that the crowd can latch onto that are becoming things in and of themselves,” he says. “I’ve read the crowd well enough that I can give them stuff that they enjoy, and amplify the stuff that they enjoy and make it bigger.”
For example: the elongated Rs for Victor Rask and Brock McGinn. Minter says that it is a little thing - “nothing” - but people like it. His pronunciation of McGinn’s first name is an homage to Paul Heyman’s in-ring announcement of Brock Lesnar, for example. “I like throwing in little references that, if you don’t get it, you’ll enjoy it. But if you do get it, it will be amazing.”
It’s a very irreverent approach - one that hearkens back to his years in section 328, home to the majority of irreverence in Canes fandom - but it serves Minter well.
And it’s one that he doesn’t take for granted.
“I’m such a big fan of the team, for years. Being able to be on the mic in the arena, for my hometown team, getting the crowd excited, being part of the show - it’s probably the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me.”