We are a League
Six markets were chosen, including Central Texas, Albuquerque, and Austin. They spent the next year signing agreements and getting commitments from venues to install the necessary infrastructure. The second part, to lobby ownership groups to take the franchises in these locations, was the next step that would put their model to the test.
The Visionaries
Owners stepped forward in each of the six markets. Some were already in the sports business, others were spankin' new to the business. The old saying that beggars cannot be choosers was a reality of the early WPHL, which had its share of struggles with under-capitalized yet enthusiastic local market franchisees.
"It's a maturation process," says Treliving, looking backward. "You had to have people who had the vision initially. Although we're sitting here, eleven years later, and, as we've grown, the model's become more defined, you've got a better process, saying you're going to bring hockey to places like Albuquerque, New Mexico or Austin, Texas, people looked at you a little bit strange.
I believe that you have to have the passion, but you also have to prioritize what is important. Making sure that the ingredients are in place to make the business successful, you have to temper the enthusiasm for the sport itself, and, in order to make the hockey business work, what are the following steps we need to do, in terms of bringing the right people in, in terms of giving ourselves enough time to be successful, in terms of capitalizing the organization. Initially we didn't always have our priorities in line."
That lead though to the first crucial test of the organization: What the league would do when one of its tall-hat, no-cattle owners could not keep the doors open, or follow the play book well enough to generate a sustainable fan base in a market.
"These are independent operations. In a lot of cases where we haven't had success over the years, going back initially, it's stemming down from ownership to management not following the priorities to be successful, of running a sound business."
The ultimate test of the league's credibility as to how it handles franchise problems came in 2000, when a contractual agreement allowed a franchisee with prior issues to open another club, the Tucson Scorch. Within weeks of opening season ticket sales were poor. There were alleged issues with securing the stadium and insurance being provided.
Knowing that certain parts of the "recipe" were missing, the league stepped in and closed the operation before it could open its doors, shuffled the players, took care of its obligations with the city, and the few season ticket holders who had bought into the team.
"As unfortunate as it was," says Treliving thoughtfully, "it reflected the process that we had in place. Once you enter a market, if you don't hit certain threshold levels, it's not going to change, and you're going to have to deal with the inevitable. Do you want to deal with it now, or wait until more people get hurt? You know you have a problem. Admit it and move on."
The league had to come into Central Texas, Corpus Christie, and El Paso. Where it made sense to find new ownership, they did. Where there wasn't a sustainable model, as in Central Texas, they shuttered the team. Knowing, though, that scorched earth is not a way to conduct business, the striking difference between the modern day CHL and its peers is how upright it is about handling its failures as well as its successes.
"It doesn't do you a bit of good to go through problems and not learn from them. You learn a hell of a lot more from your failures than you do from your successes."
The First Acquisition Rewrites the Hockey Map
In June of 2001 the Central Hockey League and the WPHL merged.
"There was a lot of overlap, to the extreme that in one place, we were in the same market, for goodness sakes, in Fort Worth" says Treliving. "Consolidation... that's what happens in today's world. Is there an opportunity to be stronger together than there is to be separate?"
On paper, and to their credit in the league's history on their website, the CHL took over the WPHL. The fact is quite the opposite: The management of the modern Central Hockey League is WPHL all the way. Treliving became president, and Kozuback, with the WPHL partnership, formed Global Entertainment as an overhead holding company for the league.
The old CHL was a largely centrally-owned operation with several of both its independent and league-owned teams teetering on the edge of collapse. The WPHL had some dead wood in its pile as well in places like Tupelo. The merger took the strongest teams of both leagues to make a greater whole. Several weaker clubs were weeded out of both operations. The new reach of the CHL covered the Midwest to the desert Southwest.
In one step, the CHL leapfrogged over the UHL as a dominant league both in numbers and quality. Lobbying by Treliving and his owners, managers, and coaches secured more affiliation agreements for Class-AA level hockey with the NHL.
Size and stability were also noticed by the East Coast Hockey League, which moved to assert its market dominance in Class-AA by absorbing the West Coast Hockey League (WCHL).
Sources at the CHL acknowledge that it has been, at times, in talks with both the UHL, which strongly denies any such discussions on the record, about a possible merger. Word is that they looked at the WCHL prior to the merger with the ECHL, but that there wasn't enough of the strengths of their franchise model to warrant a serious discussion of incorporating the small West-Coast league into the CHL fold.
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