New team brings professional hockey back to Indy.
by Ben Smith
Five days before Christmas, and no peace on earth this night.
Instead, there is only a scoreboard tilted against them again, and a flat crack echoing off the cinderblock walls of this narrow hallway outside the visitor's dressing room in Allen County War Memorial Coliseum in Fort Wayne. The Indy Fuel of the ECHL, Indianapolis' newest venture into professional hockey, has just lost to the league's best team, the venerable Fort Wayne Komets, 3-1. It's the Fuel's eighth straight loss in this, its inaugural season, and the 13th in the last 15 games.
Now the door to the dressing room is closed and there is only that flat crack, the sound of hockey sticks being hurriedly slapped down in a shapeless black duffel bag for the trip home.
“Locker room open?” a visitor asks an equipment man as he scurries past.
“No,” he snaps.
But a minute or so later the door opens, and out steps a compact young man wearing a black baseball cap turned backward, his face framed by a neat ginger beard.
This is team captain Mike Duco, a seven-year pro who has seen some things. On his resume are 18 games in the National Hockey League with the Florida Panthers and Vancouver Canucks, plus stops in the Triple A American Hockey League with Rochester, Chicago and Toronto. The Fuel is his second go-around in the ECHL, an affiliated league that serves as the de facto Double A loop for the NHL.
For all his travels, Duco has never had this experience–playing on a young expansion team trying to revive hockey in a city that hasn't had pro hockey in 10 years, even though its history with the game stretches back to 1939.
“It's pretty exciting, obviously,” Duco says. “We saw the enthusiasm of the people in the city when we first came out, and everybody was pretty pumped up to have hockey back in.”
But?
“But nobody wants to see a losing team right now. So we've just got to start figuring it out over break here and come back revived.”
Wayne Gretzky played his first professional hockey game in Indianapolis.
That was with the Racers of the World Hockey Association, the impudent pro league that threw a lot of money around trying to challenge the NHL in the 1970s. Ultimately, it failed, but hockey in Indianapolis didn't.
It's been around since the Capitals of the AHL first took the ice at the Indiana State Fairgrounds Coliseum in 1939, and has intermittently continued, most recently with the Ice, a Chicago Blackhawks affiliate which played in the International and Central leagues from 1988-2004. Now, a decade later, the Fuel, also a Blackhawks affiliate, has returned pro hockey to the city.
A two-year, $63 million renovation of the Fairgrounds Coliseum–now known as Indiana Farmers Coliseum–was the major impetus for the revival, inducing owners Jim and Sean Hallett to launch the Fuel.
“I think Indianapolis is a great market,” Jim Hallett, one of the original owners of the old Ice, said when the team was announced last year. “Indianapolis has demonstrated that it has a hockey base of fans here … I think it was a case of having the right arena, the right venue. Then being able to attract the right hockey team, and the venue is certainly right.”
Certainly the league welcomed Indianapolis with open arms.
“We look at all of this from a geographic standpoint, and you know you've got Evansville, Fort Wayne, Toledo, Kalamazoo, Cincinnati and Indianapolis,” says Komets team president Michael Franke, whose family rescued Fort Wayne's 63-year-old franchise in 1990, and engaged in a fierce natural rivalry with the Ice through the '90s. “This is something that's been on Fort Wayne's radar, really, since Indy left the old IHL. So for us to get Indy back, it's just huge for us.
“It's an unbelievable market. This is going to take a little time to develop into what I know the owners of the Indianapolis team are going to eventually accomplish. (But) the sponsorship base is great, and the bottom line is the ownership is incredible and the leadership group within their organization is incredible.”
That would include head coach and vice president of hockey operations Scott Hillman, who's been down this path before. In 2009 he was head coach of the Missouri Mavericks during their inaugural season in the CHL, and his plan for the Fuel is to build from the ground up with young players. The Fuel carries 14 rookies on its roster, and only six players are older than 25.
“We wanted to start with a very, very young team and grow something we could be proud of in a couple years,” Hillman says. “We didn't want to bring in a bunch of guys that are close to retirement and ready to start hanging them up. We wanted to work our way through the struggles.
“It was my experience in doing this five years ago that you want to make your own foundation, you want to create your own team and your own style of play. So moving forward, they come to understand the work ethic that it takes, and these guys, as you develop your own core of players, they're the guys that are the leaders in the locker room. We didn't want to go get a bunch of established leaders that learned not only good habits around some other places but also bad habits, too. It's a big effort, takes a lot of patience. It's a grind–but that's the path we set out for.”
It's hurt them at the gate, early on. After drawing 6,477 for their home opener – a 5-4 shootout loss to the Komets – the Fuel drew more than 5,000 fans only twice more in 14 home dates through Christmas. Their average attendance of 3,361 ranked 23rd out of 29 ECHL teams.
But although they won just five games before Christmas, better days are coming, everyone believes. Nine of the 21 losses the Fuel had in the first six weeks of the season were by one goal.
“Believe it or not, we can start to feel it coming together,” Hillman says. “We're going to continue to take some lumps against maybe the top couple teams in each division, maybe, but we feel we're playing with the majority of the teams each and every night.
“Once these guys learn to win those one-goal games, we're going to feel real good about ourselves.”
And Indianapolis, a hockey town from way back, will feel better about the Fuel.
“If the wins were coming, people would be coming a lot more, right?” Duco says. “People were enthused [at the start], people were excited. There was no hockey here. I don't know if Indy is a big hockey town. But everybody's saying it was, so hopefully we can bring that spark back to the city.”
