Proposal for new hockey team falls flat July 24, 2002

No owners are found for an ACHL franchise to play in Coliseum Annex

Plans for a Winston-Salem entry in the new Atlantic Coast Hockey League have fallen through.

"We have not been able to find local ownership, and we will not have a team this year," Bucky Dame, the director of Joel Coliseum, said yesterday.

Dame said that he and Bill Coffey, a former owner of a hockey team in Winston-Salem who is putting together the new league, could not find anyone interested in investing in the proposed franchise, which was to begin play in the Coliseum Annex in late October.

"We just couldn't get enough interest drummed up, and I didn't feel comfortable spending any more time working on it," Dame said. "We needed to be up and running by now. I didn't want to have a repeat of what happened in the past. The last two teams here started late in the summer, and it's tough to make a go of it doing that. We set a date of July 1 to have something in place, and we went a little past that, but it just wasn't going anywhere."

Coffey said he has teams lined up in Fayetteville, Knoxville, Tenn., and three Florida cities - St. Petersburg, Orlando and Jacksonville - for the ACHL this season and that he is close on adding several other cities.

He said he was disappointed, and a little surprised, that Winston-Salem won't be part of the new league.

"I thought somebody would be interested, but you never know for sure," Coffey said. "We just couldn't get any locals involved."

Dame said that although he preferred to see a team with local owners, ownership outside the area would have been considered.

"But we didn't have anyone step up," Dame said. "I won't say that we didn't have interested parties. There were some that wanted to find six or eight people to go in together, but that's hard to do. We had people taking a look at it, but we never got anyone to say they wanted to do this."

Dame said he thought that the ACHL plan, which he said will operate on a reasonable financial scale in comparison to other minor leagues, offered potential for success and that the door might still be open down the road, depending on how the new league does.

"This probably is not the best time in terms of the economy to go out and do a minor-league hockey team, especially when there is a history here of teams not doing well," Dame said. "The last thing we need is another team not achieving."

Four professional hockey teams have operated in Winston-Salem. All went out of business or left town.

The last team was the Winston-Salem IceHawks, which moved to Glens Falls, N.Y., in 1999.

"I don't know how much any of that played into it, or if people still want to see what happens with the team in Greensboro," Coffey said. "A lot of people looked at this, but no one committed."

Dame said that the Greensboro Generals, who compete in the East Coast Hockey League, will not play any games at the Coliseum Annex in 2002-03 as they did last season.

Dame said that neither he nor the Generals pursued scheduling games in Winston-Salem. He said that attendance was low for the 10 games the Generals played here last season.

"I didn't call them, and they didn't call me," Dame said.