Pee Dee IceCats

56

So now I get to talk about a league that I've been ignoring for over a decade because the team whose logo I'm reviewing this week is sort of forcing my hand.

There are, for the record, some leagues in both hockey and baseball that I just don't cover for whatever reason. In baseball I don't mess with the Arizona Complex League or Florida Complex League because the teams are named after their MLB affiliate and use their affiliate's logo, and I also don't mess with really low, short-season leagues like the Empire Professional Baseball League or the Pecos League. I don't mess with semi-professional leagues like hockey's Ligue Nord-Américaine de Hockey or the Canadian Baseball League. (The CBL has recently become fully pro and I'm trying to decide if I'm going to add it.) And I don't mess with the Federal Prospects Hockey League because frankly, it's a bit of a mess.

To be honest, when the league first formed I didn't mess with it because I didn't expect it to last very long. (This was back in 2010; clearly I was wrong.) The first season saw the league debut with six teams, and by the end of the first season one team had relocated and another had folded. Only one team averaged more than 700 fans a game. Sure, lots of leagues had inauspicious beginnings — heck, the NHL had a midseason fold in its first season. But most aren't quite this bad. And things haven't necessarily gotten much better: although there's a steady core of teams that have been around a decent while, roughly half of the teams that have ever played in the league have lasted two seasons or less. Of the fourteen teams that played last season, three aren't playing in the league this season. One folded, and two others have left the league to join another league, presumably for stability reasons. One of those teams — and this is why I'm mentioning all this — is the Pee Dee IceCats.

Indeed, the history of the IceCats is a pretty good indicator of what a mess the FPHL can be. The team (arguably) began in 2022 as the Elmira Mammoth of Elmira, New York. The Mammoth, to say the least, were not successful: they went through three coaches, and they got evicted at the end of the season when the arena said the team had failed to pay over a quarter of a million dollars in utilities. Technically the Mammoth folded, but the league then created a new (league-owned) team in Elmira called the Elmira River Sharks and as far as I can tell it was basically the same team in most regards (same city, same core of players, etc.). That team paid its bills — or at least I didn't find any indication that they didn't — but attendance was down 37% from the previous season, and at the end of the season the arena chose not to renew the River Sharks' lease and instead brought in a team in the North American Hockey League (a Tier II junior hockey league). So the league sold the team to someone who moved the team to Poughkeepsie, New York to play as the Hudson Valley Venom. That proved to be a disaster, and by December the team had been sold again, renamed HC Venom, and made into a travelling team. It ultimately found an arena to finish the season out (in Poughkeepsie, interestingly). And then the team moved again, this time to Florence to play as the Pee Dee IceCats. Just four games into the season, three of the team's owners ousted the fourth.

Remember, everything in the previous paragraph happened in just three years and a month. That's four permanent homes (plus a stint with no permanent home) and four ownership groups.

Fortunately, things seem to have settled down since then. Last season the IceCats led the league in attendance with 4,763 (in a league where a third of the teams couldn't break 2,000), and made it all the way to the league finals. So it would seem that this new ownership group knows what it's doing, and should be trusted to know what's best for the team.

And what they decided is best for the team is to leave the soap opera which is the Federal Prospects Hockey League and join the SPHL. The SPHL is a higher level of play, and the league is clearly better run (eight of its twelve teams have been playing since 2017 or before). Obviously one can't say with absolute certainty that the IceCats will be successful in the SPHL until they're got a few years in that circuit under their belt, but one can certainly see why they made the move.

As far as the name is concerned, it's obviously a call back to Florence's first hockey team, the Pee Dee Pride of the East Coast Hockey League (the ECHL was still using its full name at the time). The Pride always used a lion as its logo, just like the IceCats. In fact, I can't help but wonder if the IceCats wouldn't rather be calling themselves the Pride but can't get the rights to do so. That's speculation on my part, but I'm sure you can see why I think that. Personally I never thought that Pee Dee Pride was a great name, but nor did I think it was a bad name. IceCats, on the other hand, is a bad name— few things scream "bush league" like a hockey team putting the word ice in its name. But Lions was already taken by an ECHL team in Québec, so if I'm right that Pride wasn't available then I can see someone thinking IceCats was they closest they could do.

I feel about the same about the logo — not horrible, but it could use a little work. The general shape of everything is all right, and at this point I tend to put things like animals chewing on pucks in logos in the "Okay, whatever" category. But the particular shade of red and the particular shade of light blue clash horribly. Given the fact that they're obviously trying to channel the spirit of the Pride, is there a reason they didn't just go with the Pride's yellow, black, and red color scheme? But even if they wanted to switch to a different color scheme, they could have done red and blue in a less eye-hurting way. You know, like the other two dozen or so hockey teams with red and blue color schemes manage.

Still, given all the craziness this team has been through in the past through years, it seems a bit harsh to gripe about a name or a color scheme. Hopefully the team is able to be successful for a long while in Florence. And hopefully, in a few years, they'll do a rebrand which involves a saner color scheme. I can be patient until then.

Final Score: 56 points.
Penalties: Region, 3 pts; Ice, 9 pts; Compound, 13 pts; Software, 8 pts; Equip-Logo, 5 pts; Colorful, 13 pts; Yucky Logo, 5 pts.
Bonuses: None.