Narrowed down the beginning of the end...

Attendance increased over the course of every Blizzard season* except one: the 1998-99 season. After this season Morris Jeffreys sold the team to David LeFevre and Beacon Sports, and after another season the team was out the door. The question: why? Where did it go wrong? As always, if anyone can chip in I'd appreciate the hell out of it; as it is I'll be hitting more microfilms this week.


*--although, as my earlier graph showed, not necessarily from one season to the next

The sports franchise as civic organization

With some more rumblings that Wheeling may not have a very long time left in the ECHL, some of the message board chatter brought up an interesting--but not unprecedented--concept: the operation of a sports franchise not strictly as a business, but as a civic organization. The most notable example of this is the Green Bay Packers, who have operated as a public corporation since their inception in the 1920s. The corporation's bylaws state that all profits from a relocation will go to local charity (previously the American Legion, now the Green Bay Packers Foundation), helping to ensure that a metropolitan area about the size of Huntington has continuously held an NFL franchise for over 80 years.

The Packers aren't entirely a non-profit entity--they're in the NFL, such a concept would be an oxymoron--but there are a few teams that actually are: the Memphis Redbirds (AAA baseball), the Great Lakes Loons (A baseball, Midland, MI), and the Kentucky Horsemen (Arena Football 2, Lexington, KY). I like the idea primarily because the investment by the community in a sports team is not purely financial, but equally if not moreso emotional. It goes well with the last bit I brought up, the idea of having control of a team shared among a relatively large group of local investors.

Of course Ernie knows best in these situations

Ernie Salvatore, longtime Huntington sportswriter, on the Blizzard's management turmoil, 7 June 1995:

This really is what's at stake here. Credibility. Honesty. Honor. Whatever. The Huntington Blizzard franchise... has retrogressed badly in these areas the past two months. Getting them back, once the fighting stops, won't be easy.

How much damage can a self-destructing management team do?

About 1500 fans/game worth. Season data is from the ECHL website; I've only gotten as far as season 3 (that big-ass drop on the graph) as far as game-to-game data.

An amusing exchange

Lost in my (relatively) dormant stretch in the last year or so was an article in the Reading Eagle on the five worst teams in ECHL history. Who was #1?

1. 1993-94 Huntington Blizzard (14-49-5)

Pro hockey returned to hard-scrabble Huntington, W.Va., in 1993 after a 40-year absence. The Blizzard had numerous ups and downs in their seven seasons, but were never so low as that inaugural year.

They still hold the ECHL marks for most goals allowed, 6.07 per game and 413 total, and their 14 wins are tied with the aforementioned Roanoke Valley and Greenville teams for fewest ever.

The Blizzard were also on the short end of two of the three worst whippings in league annals, a 15-0 loss to Greensboro and a 16-3 loss at Nashville on Super Bowl Sunday in which goalie Jim Mill played all 60 minutes.

This team, which once gave up 67 shots in a game against South Carolina, also had a 16-game winless streak, a league-record 12-game home winless streak, is second-worst all-time with just 33 points and is tied for the third-worst winning percentage at .243.

The Blizzard had three coaches that year, including former NHL player Bob "Battleship" Kelly, who was fired after a 5-14-2 start. Defenseman Jared Bednar finished with a plus-minus rating of minus-82.

What gives the Blizzard the slight edge over the 2003-04 Grrrowl and the 1992-93 Rampage, however, was that they lost four of seven games to a horrid Louisville (16-44-8) team.

The Blizzard bounced back to make the playoffs the following season. They stuck around until 2000, and there's a small movement online to bring them back.

O RLY?

Howdy,

Found your article from December on the 5 worst teams in ECHL history--certainly can't argue with the findings. I'd also like to add that the '93-94 Blizzard's top scorer (or at least he was at that point) quit the team... in the middle of a game.

I was most curious, though, about the comment at the end about the "small movement online" to bring a team back; I have a webpage up on hockey in Huntington from some work I did in college at Marshall and was wondering if you knew more (or if in fact you just managed to stumble upon my humble webpage--huntingtonhockey.blogspot.com). If it's not a movement of me, myself, and the voices in my head, I'd like to get a hold of them...

His reply:

Yeah, I stumbled onto your blog and dubbed it a small movement. I guess the movement is even smaller than I realized!

In related news, I might put a guestbook up...

Attendance recap: 1994-95

Average (regular season): 3747/game

Average including playoffs: 3677/game
--Huntington's two playoff games were on a Tuesday and Wednesday, which not surprisingly depressed attendance a bit

Monday games were surprisingly well-attended, averaging 4096/game; granted, one of these four games was the day after Christmas, while another was a special event for schoolkids (noon start, kids got a hockey game, a lecture on education from coach Paul Pickard, and a field trip for $4).

At this point Blizzard attendance had stabilized; there were only three games over 5000 fans in '94-95, yet their overall attendance inched slightly upward. Through 68 regular season games, the Blizzard's average attendance was 3743/game, which if they were competing in the ECHL today would only be about 500 off the league average, but then we're comparing the ECHL at its height (94-95 avg. 5315/game) to the ECHL in decline (4217/game). Still, things were looking promising by the end of that season....

A preview of things to come

Been slowly getting that Blizzard attendance recap thingy knocked out, almost done with the Bob Henry era. One thing I've noticed--which is a little surprising--is that, at least through almost two seasons, if you plot a curve for the attendance data, it comes out more or less flat... I was expecting some decay. Of course I'm still in the Bob Henry era, but it's interesting seeing the relative stability of the fanbase at this point in time.

The Obama Method

Forgive me if I insert a political reference, but the title there is my quick-and-dirty name for getting a lot of money in small amounts out of a lot of people. In the context of this page, a similar endeavor was attempted to keep the old IHL Hornets in town, but I'm invoking it right now because Dayton Bombers owner Costa Papista is trying a similar approach in readying his franchise for a 2010 return:

Papista plans to[...] offer minority investors the opportunity to buy into the team at the $5,000 level through a private placement memorandum.

The plan calls for the team to secure 230 of these investors within 60 days, along with a new majority owner. The makeup of ownership would thus be 50.5% new guy, 10% Costa Papista, 39.5% everyone else--for those counting, that means that to feasibly run an ECHL franchise costs around $3 million. For comparison's sake, let's set the WABAC machine for 4 January 1957 (from the Raleigh Journal, courtesy of the always awesome NewspaperArchive.com):

Huntington Group Nears Hornets Purchase Price

HUNTINGTON (AP) - A local group headed by promoter Dick Deutsch today was within $10,820 of the reported $35,000 needed to buy the Huntington Hornets International Hockey League club from its present Fort Wayne, Ind. owners.

Deutsch announced after a public meeting last night that Huntington business and private individuals had pledged to purchase 2,418 shares at $10 a share in a proposed "Huntington Hornet Corp."

Deutsch holds an option to buy the club. He says he wants the people of Huntington to feel that it is their team. The option expires Monday.

Evansville, Ind., also has made overtures to purchase the club and move the franchise there. The club was moved here from Grand Rapids, Mich., only last year.

Per the US Government, that would amount to an IHL franchise costing shade over a quarter-million dollars in 2009 money. One of those shares would be $75; Papista is taking season-ticket deposits at $50. My, how things change...

Help me internets!

I stumbled upon a Myspace page for "a group of individuals trying to bring a Professional Hockey Team to the City of Huntington WV."

One problem: the page has been deleted. I got that much from the Google-cache--I *just* missed these guys apparently.

So anyone out there stumbling upon this page, can you possibly help me out? I'm curious to know what happened...

While I'm stalledish on one angle though...

...new motivation to dig a little more on the Tri-State Hockey League. Of everything I've looked up in the two and a half years of semi-sporadic research (my wife is telling me as I type this that I should write a book of all this!), this is the corner that excites me the most. As far as I can tell West Virginia was in fact the site of the first organized ice hockey played in the Southern US, when Charleston's Ice Sports rink opened in 1937 (beating Miami's Tropical Hockey League by a season). Had the TSAHL gotten off the ground, it would have been something of a proto-ECHL, straddling what were the territories of the Eastern Hockey League and the Michigan-Ontario League:

• Huntington and Charleston, WV
• Akron and Toledo, OH
• plans for teams in Pittsburgh and Johnstown, PA, and Cleveland

Interestingly, on the territory note, the Toledo Babcocks were apparently in the MOHL while they were in the TSAHL; they were brought in when the proposed Pittsburgh entry failed to materialize, and Johnstown did in fact have a team the next season in the EHL, so talent-wise, I'm considering them to be essentially equal. Unfortunately, you'll notice that above I only list four teams that actually played, and two of them were a relatively close distance to each other--this ended up being the downfall of the league. Both Huntington and Charleston were on shaky ground, and were able to keep afloat because they were so close to each other, thus able to share costs for things like road trips. When Huntington's Iceland closed in February 1940, Charleston's Comets--barely able to keep going on their own, even with a fierce Huntington-Charleston rivalry--followed suit.

This much I know. What I'm curious about, though, is how they got from point A to B to C and so on...