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My other sports passion besides baseball is hockey. I have had season tickets to our local minor league pro hockey team for the last several years. The entire business model for AA hockey is completely messed up. I've heard that 80% of teams lose money. Our team is in that bracket and could fold at any time. This, despite the fact they had several large crowds last year, and have had increasing attendance for 3 straight seasons. It's just a very expensive business, way more expensive than single-A baseball. And since it is the #4 team sport, it is a much tougher sell. Just not as many fans for it.

Here are my grievances:
1) Teams that struggle at the gate also struggle to attract players, and it becomes a viscious cycle. The teams that draw, win. The teams that don't draw, lose. Losing teams end up folding. In the 1990s, there were over 100 pro hockey teams at the "AA" level, and now there are only 33 left. So I guess I should be glad we have one of the few pro teams left.
2) It's just following the trend to eliminate union jobs (AA pro players have a union). So when a AA pro team folds, they are often replaced with a junior hockey team. Junior players play for free.
3) Fan bases (like mine) get strung along for a number of years with mediocre teams before they finally fold. We deserve better. All I ask for is a level playing field. We get that in baseball, in the Midwest League. Why can't minor pro hockey have that?
4) I don't want to make it sound too bleak. Quad Cities had a good team last year. They finished 5th, missed the playoffs by a few points. But they had the league MVP, and had several players that got called up to the next level. And they may just flush all that down the toilet. Last year, the league champion team actually folded. It's absolutely pathetic.
5) Basically, the root of the problem seems to be that the hockey leagues are weak, and teams that are drawing well are powerful enough to push and pull the rules in their favor (basically they push to raise the salary cap and number of veteran players allowed). They can push the rules to make it very tough on the lesser teams to win. In baseball, by contrast, I have never seen the Midwest League do anything that would harm any of their member franchises. Ever. Even the ones located in Clinton, IA and Beloit, WI.

It's to the point where I would actually be glad if our local pro AA team finally folded, because we could move on to getting something way, way more stable, in a stronger league. We would be a great option for the junior USHL league, which is the top junior league in the U.S. That is a league that seems to be very strong, and interested in growing hockey as a sport. We have a population of 400,000 people. Just get us a viable Winter sports team that I can root for during the baseball offseason, is that too much to [expletive] ask?

If anyone is familiar with the Missouri River Otters hockey team, our team was once in the same league as them. Quad Cities has always had a pro team since 1995, but it has been very turbulent to say the least.

Ha, St. Charles, MO is joining the same AA league as Quad Cities, starting in 2013-14.

Hopefully this doesn't mean the QC team is relocating to St. Charles at that time!

Good luck and congrats, if there are any minor league hockey fans there.

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/stch ... 0f31a.html

OK, so I need to vent on this some more.

The douchebags that owned our team last year sold season tickets for this season, then at some point this summer simply vanished and left town. Didn't tell anyone they were folding or anything. They just stopped paying the front office people. Everyone left, except for 2 guys, who stayed and worked on a volunteer basis. We got into August and September and did not have a team owner. "Someone" was in charge, because they were announcing the schedule, player signings, etc.

They had to delay training camp about 9 days after all the other teams. Our signed players could not take the ice because they did not have insurance. And the Canadian players (about 40% of the roster) could not come to the USA....because they could not list an employer on a work visa!!! They couldn't list their employer because technically the team did not have anyone in charge that you could call an "employer". The team had their first practice with only about 13 players just 2 days before their first game. The league actually delayed that game while everything got sorted out. That is pretty much unprecedented in this league.

The Central Hockey League is not a rinky-dink operation. The Missouri Mavericks are in this league. They play in a gleaming new 6,000 seat arena in Independence, MO, and sell out most of their games. Tulsa, Wichita, Rapid City, SD, Allen, TX (suburban Dallas) all play to big crowds in really nice, new arenas. It boggles my mind that this league would let our team flounder like this.

What makes it so frustrating is that QC has a very solid history. We have a really nice arena that seats up to 9,000 for hockey. Players still want to play here, despite all the problems. The brother of one of our old longtime favorite players came back from playing in Europe to play here this year. There are at least 4 players who have made this area their home. We have a nice core of diehard fans. They have a jersey auction and routinely sell game-worn jerseys for over $1000 each, usually raising at least $25K total, sometimes up to $40K or $50K. Our team won 3 championships and set attendance records back in the day. Even in a supposedly "bad" year for attendance, we were in the middle of the pack for this league. The real issue is that the owners and people they hired to run the team were clueless, or under-funded, or both.

Now, I hear there is another owner taking over the team. This will be the 5th different owner in the last 5 seasons. So it's hard for me to believe at this point this new guy will be any different. I really hope he is because there is no doubt in my mind minor league hockey can work here.

I really hope they get it all straightened out over there. I used to work for a USHL team that to some degree is still on edge (mostly because of the nature of the industry), but they have been much more stable than they were only three or four years ago. A lot of that is a credit to the team owner and the efforts he made to make the experience better (securing a long-term naming rights deal to the arena, making renovations, lowering concessions prices, etc.)

By Wichita I assume you mean the Wichita Thunder? At least that's what they were called in 2008, which was the last time I went to a game there. But yes, it's a beautiful rink.

And I love the USHL. Back when I lived in IA, myself and a bunch of work buddies were big Des Moines Buccaneers fans. We'd make the hour drive to Des Moines usually 4 or 5 times a season to watch them play.

Yes, that is the Wichita Thunder I was referring to.

Then after writing that last night, I wake up to this:
Ownership talks break down; but season still on for Mallards

As a sports fan I really needed another kick in the nuts after last night.

MrCrowesGarden wrote:I really hope they get it all straightened out over there. I used to work for a USHL team that to some degree is still on edge (mostly because of the nature of the industry), but they have been much more stable than they were only three or four years ago. A lot of that is a credit to the team owner and the efforts he made to make the experience better (securing a long-term naming rights deal to the arena, making renovations, lowering concessions prices, etc.)

Yes! I have actually been lobbying for a USHL team to come here for a couple years now. The league we are in right now is professional, which makes it very expensive. This is why we are always teetering on the brink of folding. We're not alone - 10 years ago there used to be over 100 teams at this double-A level in a number of different leagues. Now we are down to 2 leagues and 33 teams. Yes, that means like 70+ teams have folded.

The USHL is technically amatuer, but it actually produces more future NHL talent than this double-A league does. Our current team will get players who may have been drafted a few years back, got their shot and didn't make it, and are trying to make it back. With the USHL you still get the guys who are on the way up. Not only that, but QC is a perfect fit for the USHL geographically. We are right smack in the middle of their area. The people who actually play hockey prefer the USHL to this double-A league because you always get full effort from those kids. Some of the older guys in this double-A league are there collecting a paycheck. I still enjoy the games, but it kind of falls under "doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result".

Here is the difference between minor league baseball and minor league hockey. In hockey, the leagues are a lot weaker, and so the powerful teams get a lot more sway over things like salary cap limits, roster sizes, # of veteran players allowed, etc. The “powers that be” are not acting in the best interests of the league or the sport, just of their own team. With baseball I feel like the league does a much better job of protecting the integrity of the league and sport. So, a team like Clinton that draws 1,500/game can compete on a pretty level playing field with a team like Kane County that draws 5,500/game. That being said, the USHL does seem to put the success of the league first. It has very good parity compared to what we have.

I think the big difference with hockey is where the young talent is spread out. In baseball, the vast majority of age 18-23 talent is in the minor leagues. Yes, some is in college, some have made it to MLB. But most of those guys are somewhere in a minor league system.

In hockey? For that age range, you've got a lot of guys already playing in the NHL, others in the AHL, some still in juniors in Canada, some in the SEL, some in the KHL, some in US college hockey. By the time you get to the ECHL's of the hockey world, you're scrounging for talent.

Last post to get it out of my system.

Back after the 2006-07 season, the league we were in was going to fold. We had good, local owners at that time. They wanted to go to the ECHL, which is the most stable of all these double-A leagues. But the other big dog in that league did not like the idea of going to a tougher league. No, too difficult to win in that league. So they actually formed their own bush league of 6 teams, and won 3 championships in that league. That is the kind of nonsense that goes on.

Our owners did not go along with that, but the ECHL would not let them in without other teams to end up with an even number. So our owners laid down some serious cash to bring a triple-A team here (AHL) for 2 seasons. They were well-intentioned, but the AHL was an even MORE expensive proposition, especially for an area that is not really an established hockey market. That lasted 2 years, then we were back at double-A.

The first double-A owner got sued from someone in his other business, and basically had to freeze his assets while the lawsuit was going on. He sold to a guy who had a lot of money, but hired people who were clueless to run the team. He sold to Club 9, which seems like a sham outfit. They basically had very little money, and some real strange rumors have come out about them. Now, these Club 9 idiots seem to be the ones hanging up the sale of the team to this new owner. I could be wrong. To me, the league should just seize the team from them, and sell to someone themselves.