When it comes to hockey, Erie has had many shots on goal

By David Skolnick

Erie’s hockey tradition dates back to 1964.

ERIE, Pa. — Knowing the Panthers minor league hockey team was leaving Erie for Baton Rouge, La., in 1996, Erie officials took a risk bringing in a junior hockey league team to take its place.

“I received a lot of criticism that we were bringing amateurs to our community,” said Casey Wells, instrumental in having the Niagara Falls (Canada) Thunder of the Ontario Hockey League come to Erie as the renamed Otters. “It took time to convince people we were bringing high-level junior hockey. I was convinced it wasn’t what the uninformed perceived it to be.”

Wells is the executive director of the Erie County Convention Center Authority.

The authority oversees four entertainment facilities in Erie including the 26-year-old Louis J. Tullio Arena, where the Otters — and before them, the Panthers of the East Coast Hockey League (now known as the ECHL) and the Erie Golden Blades of the now-defunct Atlantic Coast Hockey League played their home games.

The OHL is a junior hockey league with players between the ages of 16 and 20.

Erie was the first city in the United States to have an OHL team. Of the league’s 20 teams, there are only two others in the U.S. — in Plymouth and Saginaw, Mich. The rest are in Canada.

“The Otters didn’t do well initially in attendance and it took awhile to ramp up, but when they won the championship [in 2002], it was huge,” Wells said.

Game attendance averaged 4,300 in 2002-03, the year after the championship. With the team playing poorly since the 2004-05 season, the Otters’ current game attendance is about 3,300.

“Erie is a blue-collar, value-conscience sports town with a long tradition of having hockey,” Wells said.

That tradition began in 1964 when a group of Canadians who worked at the General Electric plant along with the help of the Erie Zoological Society started the Erie Lions, a semipro hockey team. (Hockey in Youngstown dates back to 2005.)

The Lions were never affiliated with a league, said Ron Sciarrilli, who played for the team from 1969 to 1975 and worked in the front office of the four versions of the Erie Blades as well as the Erie Golden Blades.

Most of the Lions’ players had full-time jobs so they didn’t want to travel, he said. The team played about 40 games a year at the Glenwood Ice Rink, now known as the JMC Ice Arena.

The Lions primarily played college teams from the U.S. and Canada and Olympic teams from countries including Australia and Italy, and often sold out the ice rink, which held 1,500 fans, about one-third of whom had to stand to watch games, Sciarrilli said.

The only times the Lions traveled was to an annual national tournament in Reno, Nev., and to a tournament that featured semipro teams from Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Illinois.

The team went out of business in 1975.

The first minor league hockey team in Erie was the Blades, who played from 1975 to 1977 in the now-defunct North American Hockey League. The team played in the 4,200-seat Erie County Field House, now an operations plant and warehouse for a cardboard box company. The team was mediocre and failed to attract a following.

The team went out of business after two seasons, leaving Erie without a hockey team for the 1977-78 season.

A team with the same name but new ownership played the 1978-79 season and won the championship in the North Eastern Hockey League, which no longer exists.

The Blades moved up to the Eastern Hockey League a year later, capturing that league’s title in 1979-80 and in 1980-81.

“Attendance was pretty good, about 2,500 to 3,000 fans a game,” said John Leisering, Mercyhurst College’s director of hockey operations for the past 23 years and an Erie hockey historian who worked for several of the city’s former hockey teams including the Blades.

“It was old-time hockey with a fight or two a game and bench-clearing fights that would go on for 15 minutes,” said Leisering.

After that third straight championship, Erie stepped up in quality by becoming a Pittsburgh Penguins and Boston Bruins affiliated team in the elite American Hockey League, the Triple A league of hockey. Among the members of that team was Jim Craig, the goalie for the famous 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, as well as a few others who played in the National Hockey League.

The big time, right?

Wrong, said Sciarrilli, who was the team’s director of operations, as well as Leisering and Wells.

The team quickly alienated the community by cutting all the local players from its roster, Leisering said.

“It left a sour taste in people’s mouths,” he said. “They didn’t do anything to endear themselves to the fans.”

“Fans didn’t identify us with the team because they weren’t consistent,” Wells added. “Players would be here and gone the next week to the NHL. Fans couldn’t identify with the players. The team thought the [Erie County] Field House sucked. It did, but you don’t say that.”

The team lasted one season in Erie with a record of 22-52-6 and then moved to Baltimore.

Next were the Erie Golden Blades — the team had to add “Golden” to its name because the previous owner had control over the “Erie Blades” name.

The team played its 1982-83 season at the field house as a member of the Atlantic Coast Hockey League, which no longer exists, while the Tullio Arena was under construction. The next season it won the ACHL championship, but two mediocre seasons followed and the Golden Blades were gone.

That left the city without hockey for the 1987-88 season.

Again new ownership invested in hockey in Erie. This time it was the Erie Panthers of the East Coast Hockey League.

The team, which started playing in the 1988-89 season, made the playoffs in its first five seasons, but three consecutive bad seasons led to smaller crowds and declining interest and the eventual move to Baton Rouge.

“If a hockey team is good, people come out to see them,” said Leisering, a radio color commentator for Panthers games.

And the reverse is true, he said.

If a team isn’t good in Erie, or in many places, you can typically tell by looking at the size of the crowds.

“Erie loves a winner,” Sciarrilli said. “You need the right ownership who live in the community and care about the team and the area.”

skolnick@vindy.com