Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 7, 1991 TAG: 9104080309
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RANDY KING SPORTSWRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
But unless club owner Henry Brabham elects to raise his ante, the local ECHL franchise has a slim chance at ever being a big winner, according to a confidential poll of current Roanoke Valley Rebels players taken by The Roanoke Times & World-News.
The players, most speaking anonymously in fear of damaging their hockey future, unanimously contend that Brabham will have to make major organizational changes in order for the Roanoke franchise to effectively compete - on and off the ice - with the rest of the quick-rising ECHL.
In the 1990-91 regular season that ended on March 12, the Rebels finished 10th in the 11-team league with a 25-32-7 record. Roanoke Valley was one of only three clubs that failed to qualify for the ECHL's postseason playoffs.
The team also failed miserably at the LancerLot gate, averaging an ECHL-low 1,566 fans in a league that averaged 4,000-plus.
The players said that because of a lack of fan support and what some dubbed as Brabham's "Mickey Mouse philosophies," the Roanoke Valley franchise has quickly become the no-man's land of the ECHL.
"This is the last place in the league a player wants to play," one player said. "There's nobody in the stands for games. There's no promotion of hockey. There's nothing.
"Players all talk and they know what's going on everywhere. Believe me, the word is out on this place. Out of the 11 teams, this place is definitely at the bottom of the list."
Another player added: "In the National Hockey League, you've heard how none of the players want to be traded to the Quebec Nordiques. Well, this place is the Quebec Nordiques of the East Coast Hockey League."
Brabham, the 62-year-old Vinton oilman who was one of the major forces behind the formation of the ECHL in 1988-89, scoffed at the players' reasoning, saying "hockey players will come up with any excuse when they're losing games."
"When they're winning, everything is fine," Brabham said.
The players' list of primary complaints included:
\ Front office personnel\ "Roanoke has no staff," Hampton Roads Admirals owner Blake Cullen told The (Norfolk) Virginian-Pilot in a Feb. 10 story.
That's an exaggeration, but only slightly, according to the players and ex-club officials. The Rebels' front office this season included first-year head coach Claude Noel, who doubled as general manager after Larry Lester resigned six weeks into the season, public relations-marketing director-radio broadcaster Ed Corwin, Brabham and his wife, Gail, who performed secretarial duties.
Corwin, who is no longer employed by the club, maintained the Rebels' staff was skeletal when compared to the manpower working for other league franchises.
"With the possible exception of Winston-Salem, our staff was one-third or one-half that of the other clubs," Corwin said. "Richmond and Nashville have seven full-timers, Cincinnati has six, and Nashville, Louisville and Hampton Roads all have at least five or six. Here, we had two full-timers, Claude and I, plus Henry and Gail."
Brabham disputed that claim, saying his staff "was comparable with the rest of the league. Look at Greensboro. Bill Coffey [club owner] doesn't have any more people than I've got."
Brabham said the primary issue is quality, not quantity.
"I didn't get the right people - again," Brabham said. "There was a lot of talk among the people I hired [Lester and Corwin] about what they were going to do, how they were going to promote and none of it was followed up on.
"Hey, it's my fault. I made the mistake of hiring 'em."
Brabham said Corwin was hired primarily to handle promotions and marketing, but failed to put together one promotion until the final home game of the season.
Corwin said he didn't have enough hands to perform all the chores expected by Brabham.
"I had to be a public-relations director, a media-relations director, a director of marketing and promotional sales, a radio broadcaster for the away games and public-address announcer for the home games," Corwin said.
"I refuse to be the goat for the low attendance figures, which have existed year after year in the Roanoke Valley. In minor-league professional sports, the subordinates are only as strong and as effective, in most cases, as the ownership.
"True, Henry has kept hockey here. But look at the attendance figures, the marketing and promotional people who have come and gone year after year, and yet there remains only one constant. Draw your own conclusion."
With Corwin out and no replacement yet hired, the Rebels' office is currently being manned by LancerLot building manager Mike Quarles, Brabham said. Noel, whose status for next season is still undetermined, is heading back home to Canada soon.
"I guess the answering machine will handle the office the next couple months," one club source said facetiously.
Lester said Brabham "will have to reconstruct the front-office situation, adding at least a couple sales people" in order to keep pace with the rest of the league.
"There's got to be more people working on the hockey," Lester said. "Henry says he's staff, but he's got his oil business, his convenience stores and the LancerLot to run. He can't put a lot of time into the hockey."
Player-assistant coach Bill Whitfield, who has played here three years and is closer to Brabham than any other Rebel, said promotion is the owner's biggest weakness.
"Henry just doesn't know what it takes to promote hockey," Whitfield said. "He needs three or four people working to promote things.
"We go into a place like Cincinnati and there's billboards with calendars and everything. People there know hockey is being played.
"Here, you could walk down a street in Vinton and I bet you couldn't find anybody who could tell you when the next Rebels home game is."
\ Club travel policy
\ This issue struck a nerve in each of the eight players polled.
All contended that Brabham's travel policy severely limited the club's chances to win games on the road. The Rebels had the ECHL's second-worst road record, winning only 10 of 32 games.
In an arrangement that spared Brabham several hundred dollars of travel expense, the club didn't usually embark on its long road trips - to Erie, Pa., Nashville, Tenn., Louisville, Ky., and Cincinnati - until the early morning hours of game day.
After an all-night bus ride, the team would normally arrive in the visiting city between 8-10 a.m., head straight to the rink to unload equipment and practice, then check in a motel - at a half-day's rate - and sleep for maybe five or six hours before going back to the rink to play the game.
"We were dead tired for most of the games," one player said. "We wouldn't have our legs and I've got to believe that had a lot to do with why we fell behind early in a lot of road games.
"By the time we'd find our legs, we'd be down 4-0, and it was too late.
"No question, we should have left around noon of the day before so we could get a good night's sleep in a motel-room bed, wake up, and be rested and ready to play the game. The other clubs all do it."
By putting the team on the bus at midnight instead of early afternoon on the day before a long road trip, Brabham was spared the cost of a full-day's rate for nine motel rooms, plus $147 per diem for each member of the normal traveling party of 21.
"It comes to about $230-$240," Brabham said. "I damn sure didn't save $240 to let 'em lose the hockey game. Look at the schedule and show me how many times I could have sent 'em a day early and it would have helped."
In Brabham's defense, there were only four games in which the players' argument came into play. But the team was 0-4 in those games.
The club left a day in advance for only two games - Dec. 21 at Nashville and Dec. 28 at Cincinnati. The Rebels split the two games.
"I wouldn't send them on the road a day early if I had all the money in the world," Brabham said. "There's no excuse in it. Players simply use this as a crutch. They can't tell me that it's that rough. The trips I went on the players were asleep after 10-15 minutes on the bus. How much sleep do you need?"
Noel confessed the travel policy is the "kind of thing that weighs on a player's mind."
"Especially at this level," the coach said. "It's a mental thing more than anything else."
Whitfield agreed, saying, "From a player's standpoint, there's nothing worse than riding the bus all night, getting four or five hours sleep and playing a game.
"Plus, psychologically to some players, it's a crutch if they don't play well."
Whitfield also admitted he understood Brabham's reasoning.
"Henry almost has to [send the team late] to justify his fan support here," Whitfield said. "He's not getting the big home crowds and making a lot of money like some other clubs. So he's justified . . . to a certain extent, that is."
Brabham, shaking his head, added, "I think if I bought a brand-new Lear jet airplane and put 'em on it, they wouldn't like the way I flew it."
\ Player amenities
\ \ BUS: In the ECHL, a hockey team's home away from home is the team bus. Over the course of a season, a team will spend hundreds of hours on the bus covering thousands of miles.
The Rebels' decrepit bus is equipped with 18 specially made bunk beds, but little else. There is a television stand, but no TV.
"The guys bitch and moan about the bus all time," a club source said. "They see the other teams like Hampton and Cincinnati with nice, plush, $100,000 buses, equipped with VCRs, color television, microwaves and stuff. And we've got this dump of a bus."
Brabham said the bus would have had a TV and VCR if Lester and Corwin had done as they were told.
"I gave Mr. Corwin and Larry the name of the person to go see who would have given us the TV and VCR to use in exchange for an ad, but they didn't do it."
Lester refuted Brabham's words. "He didn't tell me 50 times. Maybe once, then all I can remember is that Henry told me that he'd take care of it."
Corwin denied he was ever told to handle the task.
Several players contended there must be an exhaust leak on the Rebels' 25-year-old "Iron Lung."
"I come home from a trip and I have to work like hell to clean the carbon monoxide fumes out of my pillow. It's a wonder we don't pass out on some trips. It's damn ridiculous," one player griped.
Brabham said the accusation was false. "There's no carbon monoxide problems on this bus," he said.
\ Identity: The Rebels must wonder if anybody in their hometown cares about them or their hockey.
For the third time in as many ECHL seasons, the Roanoke franchise ranked last in the league in home attendance.
"You hear all the remarks about it," Whitfield said. "Guys from other teams will tell me on the ice, `Geez, I played in front of bigger crowds in PeeWee hockey.'
"Sometimes in the locker room before home games we joke around about how many people will be in the stands tonight," one player said.
"It's hard to get charged up playing in front of so few people. We go into other rinks around the league and there's 10,000 people in the building. Here, there's the same 1,500 fans every game."
Brabham said this was one area he could sympathize with the players.
"I know how the players feel when you skate on the ice and you see 400 people in the stands for pregame warmups. At 7 o'clock, nobody is in this building for some reason. They don't come in until the game starts."
While hockey players in Cincinnati and Hampton Roads are among those towns' recognizable personalities, the Rebels saunter through life in the Roanoke Valley virtually unnoticed.
"In those places, I'm told the hockey players are big heroes all over town," one player said. "They're on talk shows, radio and TV, all the time. Here, not many people even recognize that you play hockey. I wonder if they even know there is a hockey team here."
\ Building: Some of the players contended that hockey always will be a tough sell playing in the 3,216-seat Vinton LancerLot, which Brabham constructed in 1984.
The LancerLot pales in comparison to Norfolk's Scope, the Cincinnati Gardens, the Nashville Auditorium and the Greensboro Coliseum.
"It's just a cement building with a tin roof on it," one player said. "You need a place with atmosphere to draw the people and their families. Many times, the building is way too cold."
"I don't think you're ever going to draw big crowds in this place," another player said. "You just don't have the professional ambiance here that you have in places like Hampton, Cincinnati and so forth. It's sort of rinky-dink, I think."
The players unanimously agreed that the club could possibly spark its image and fan support by playing at least several home games at the 8,363-seat Roanoke Civic Center.
"I think Roanoke would be a perfect location," one player said. "Why not try it, because we're sure not drawing in Vinton."
\ Summation
\ The general feeling by players polled and former club officials is that it's solely up to Henry Brabham if the Roanoke Valley franchise is to survive.
"First," said Whitfield, "there's got to be some stability in the front office. Every year, it's all fresh people coming in to do a new job. And at the end of the season, they're gone.
"Henry has gotten away with a lot. Henry likes power. He likes to be in a position of power.
"But you can't always find fault with people and the way they do their jobs. You need to get a group of people that can work well together and keep them. Decisions have to be made now. Henry can't afford to wait a couple months to wait and start working on next season."
Corwin, who has been around pro hockey for 19 years, said Brabham will have to realize "you've got to spend money to make money."
Brabham, who said he hopes to soon fill the front-office void by hiring a couple of "aggressive college kids," still holds hope that his beleaguered franchise can keep up with the rest of America's fastest-growing professional minor league.
"This season was disappointing to say the least," Brabham said. "I lost money again this year.
"I haven't given up, though. I still think we can compete with the big-city teams in this league."
But Brabham realizes he's fighting a difficult battle. Anywhere else, this franchise already would have been 10 feet under. Brabham has been able to stay in the ECHL game because he owns his rink, a fact that allows him to operate at much lower expense than the rest of the league. Unlike the other owners, he doesn't have to pay $2,500-$3,000 a night in rent, plus he collects all concessions profits, a perk he admitted helped offset this season's beating at the turnstiles.
The Rebels' estimated 1990-91 budget was close to $400,000, approximately half than the reported budgets of Hampton Roads, Cincinnati and Richmond.
"We drew the same amount of people this year as we have for the last three years," he said. "But we can't make it on 1,500 [fans] a night anymore.
"I really don't feel promotion is the big problem. We seem to draw the same amount no matter what we do. You start to get the feeling people are saying, `To hell with you, move on.'
"Not threatening anybody, but look at the facts. I'm 62 years old and I don't want to continue to lose money on hockey. There's too many things I can convert this building into. The building is supporting itself without the hockey. So I don't have to have hockey in here.
"No matter what some people say, hockey is not simply a tax write-off for me. I just like the game, that's it. I feel like I put this league together and I feel like I would like to stay in it. But if economics determine I can't, then I'm out."
Brabham hinted the ideal scenario would be to sell the club. The kicker, though, is will the purchasing party keep the club here?
"I've got two or three people who are trying to buy me out," Brabham said. "I would like for them to buy the team and keep it here, but if that's not a possibility, I don't know what I'll do.
"I do know one thing: We can't survive the way things are now."
by CNB