Tag: Stadium Arena

Illustration of goaltender Marco Baron on the cover of a 1979-80 Grand Rapids Owls program from the International Hockey League

Grand Rapids Owls

July 7, 2022

Pro hockey returned to Grand Rapids, Michigan abruptly in December 1977 with the messy midseason arrival of the Dayton Owls, an International Hockey League club displaced due to low attendance just two dozen games into the 1977-78 season. The Owls would provide the first pro hockey action seen in Grand Rapids since the departure of the IHL’s Rockets 22 years earlier at the end of the 1955-56 season. The Grand Rapids Owls would appear in the IHL’s Turner Cup Finals in 1979 before disbanding the following year.

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1989-90 Grand Rapids Hoops Media Guide from the Continental Basketball Association

Grand Rapids Hoops / Grand Rapids Mackers

October 10, 2015

The Grand Rapids Hoops were a durable minor league basketball operation that played 14 Continental Basketball Association seasons in various buildings in and around the Western Michigan city.  The team was known as the Grand Rapids Mackers for a period (1994-1996) after ownership briefly passed into the hands of Scott and Mitch McNeal, founders of the Gus Macker 3-on-3 basketball tournament empire.  When the McNeals unloaded the team in 1996, new owner Bob Prsybysz quickly restored the “Hoops” identity.

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