Virginia Lancers

Atlantic Coast Hockey League (1983-1987)
All-American Hockey League (1987-1988)
East Coast Hockey League (1988-1990)

Background

FWiL contributor Hoffman Wolff wrote up our Virginia Lancers entry. Hoffman grew up watching ECHL hockey in Virginia and the Carolinas in the 1990′s.  His father, Miles Wolff, owned the ECHL’s Raleigh IceCaps club from 1991 to 1995.

The Roanoke area was a longtime stronghold of hockey in the South, hosting a pro team in every winter but one between 1967 and 2004. The various clubs played in a succession of lower-level leagues – the Eastern League, the Southern League, the Atlantic Coast League and so on.  For most of this history, pro hockey bounced between the region’s two conventional arenas: the Roanoke Civic Center and the Salem Civic Center.

After the Atlantic Coast Hockey League’s Virginia Raiders, owned by Roanoke oilman Henry Brabham, folded at the end of the 1982-83 campaign, the Southwest Virginia region began the fall of 1983 without pro hockey.  However, Brabham re-emerged just a couple months later, purchasing the bankrupt Nashville South Stars ACHL franchise and moving them in mid-season back to the Salem Civic Center.  Brabham renamed the team the Virginia Lancers after his “Lancer Mart” chain of convenience stores in the area.

The LancerLot

After the season, Brabham built the LancerLot Sports Complex in neighboring Vinton.  The Lancers moved in to the LancerLot in November 1984. It was a peculiar building. My Dad and I went to a game at the LancerLot when I was a kid.  It was a utilitarian 3,000-seat barn and it had an exercise facility attached.  I remember that you could see people jogging on treadmills as the game went on. It was a strange setting.

The ACHL soldiered on for the next few seasons, with stronger clubs in places like Utica, Erie and Winston-Salem (NC) joined by an assortment of oddball franchises, such as the Pinebridge Bucks of tiny Spruce Pine, NC (population 2,100) and the New York Slapshots, who meandered from arena to arena before becoming a road-only team.

Championship Under John Tortorella

After a couple of forgettable campaigns on the ice, the Lancers put things together in 1986-87, assembling a 36-19-3 record and capturing the ACHL championship.  The team was coached by John Tortorella, now better known for winning the 2004 Stanley Cup as Head Coach of the Tampa Bay Lightning and, later, for his amusingly curt post-game press conferences as the Head Coach of the New York Rangers.

The strain from years of barely getting by finally sunk the ACHL in 1987.  The Slapshots folded five games into the 1986-87 season. Mohawk Valley (Utica) called it a day after the season.  Erie refused to continue in a three-team league.  That left the Lancers and the Carolina Thunderbirds scrambling to find some sort of a league, or at least some opponents, for the 1987-88 campaign.  With few options, the two teams hooked on with the All-American Hockey League, a frail Midwestern loop.  Tortorella’s Lancers obliterated their inferior competition, going 37-5-1 and outscoring AAHL opponents 321-129 that winter.

Formation of the East Coast Hockey League

Brabham and Carolina Thunderbirds owner Bill Coffey spent the following offseason trying to put together a new league for their franchises, which now numbered three. Brabham had entered a Johnstown, Pennsylvania club into the AAHL in January 1988.  After securing arena leases in Erie and Knoxville, Tennessee as well, the East Coast Hockey League was born in 1988.

A stronger league was bad news for the Lancers, who finished last in the ECHL at 22-30-8 in 1988-89.  After the season, Brabham sold the Lancers to Richard Geery, a businessman from New York City.  In 1989-90, the Lancers had a stronger finish, third in the now eight-team ECHL at 36-18-6, but brought up the rear in attendance, finishing at 1,754 per game.  Near the season’s end, Geery announced that there was a “pretty good chance” he would move the team out of Vinton.  But concrete plans for relocation were never revealed and Geery just sort of wandered off. He abandoned the club, leaving behind debts of $28,000 to Brabham (who still owned the arena), the league, and various businesses in town.

Back(wards) To The Future

The ECHL revoked the Lancers membership in June 1990.

Shortly thereafter Brabham purchased an ECHL expansion franchise for the LancerLot for the 1990-91 season.  Borrowing the name and logo from a popular local club of the 1970’s, the team was re-branded the “Roanoke Valley Rebels”.  Recycling names of past teams is certainly nothing new in pro sports, but in this case it was a tone-deaf move on Brabham’s part. Using Confederate iconography may have been slightly more common place in the early 1970’s, but by 1990 the “Rebels” name and rather weird logo (the Stars and Bars overlaid on a maple leaf) came across as insensitive and backward.

The LancerLot still stands in Vinton, Virginia today and is home to a health club.

Links

Atlantic Coast Hockey League Programs

East Coast Hockey League Media Guides

East Coast Hockey League / ECHL Programs

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