Tiger Sharks History! The Pre-Tallahassee Years

It may surprise you to learn this, but the Tallahassee Tiger Sharks (now the Macon Whoopee) are the fourth oldest minor league hockey team in North America. Although hockey first came to Tallahassee in 1994 in the form of the Tiger Sharks, the team that came here has existed since 1978. In that time, the team has had eight different names, been a part of four different leagues (one of which had two names) and made a home in five different cities in four different states.

The team's history began in 1978. At this point, low-level minor league hockey on the East Coast was going through a period of major instability. The Eastern Hockey League, which had been in existence since 1933, broke apart in 1973 with approximately one third of the teams folding, one third forming the North American Hockey League in the Northeast, and one third forming the Southern Hockey League in the Southeast. The entire SHL folded in February of 1977, before the completion of the 1976-77 season. The NAHL completed that season, but folded over the summer of 1977.

After a one-year hiatus, a new league was created for the 1978-79 season called the North Eastern Hockey League. One of the new teams was the Utica Mohawks, the franchise that would later become known as the Tiger Sharks. The other teams were the Erie Blades, Johnstown Wings, Jersey Aces, and New Hampshire Freedoms.

The league quickly proved to be no more stable then the NAHL or SHL had been. Before the first season ended, two teams had made mid-season relocations with the Jersey Aces becoming the Hampton (Va.) Aces and the New Hampshire Freedoms becoming the Cape Cod Freedoms. But at least all the teams survived to see the next season. Over the summer of 1979, the Cape Cod Freedoms moved yet again to become the Richmond Rifles, a new team in Baltimore called the Baltimore Clippers joined and the league renamed itself the Eastern Hockey League to reflect the fact that a considerable portion of the league was no longer in the Northeast.

In 1980, the Mohawks relocated to the Roanoke Valley area of Virginia, which would be their home for the next thirteen years. First they settled in Salem to become the Salem Raiders. They played there for a year in the EHL before the league folded. Only four teams survived the league: the Raiders, the Baltimore Clippers, the Richmond Rifles, and the Erie Blades.

While the Erie Blades made the jump to the American Hockey League, the other three teams laid the foundation to form a new league called the Atlantic Coast Hockey League. Richmond would pull out before the league took to the ice, but Salem and Baltimore (who renamed themselves the Skipjacks) were joined by the Winston-Salem Thunderbirds (today's Wheeling Nailers), the Cape Cod Buccaneers, the Schenectady Chiefs, the Fitchburg Trappers, and the Mohawk Valley Stars to make the league a seven-team circuit.

But the ACHL, like so many of its predecessors had troubles from the start. The Fitchburg Trappers folded after only six games. The Schenectady Chiefs lasted only nine. And in the February, when the Cape Cod Buccaneers become the third team to fold before the season ended, the remaining teams voted to end the regular season immediately and go straight to the playoffs.

But while the league had only barely survived the 1981-82 season, it did manage to return in the fall of 1982. Over the preceding summer, the Salem Raiders moved to nearby Vinton, VA and changed their name to the Virginia Raiders, while the Winston-Salem Thunderbirds changed their name to the Carolina Thunderbirds. (Years later, in the ECHL, they would change their name back to the Winston-Salem Thunderbirds before moving to Wheeling.) The Mohawk Valley Stars remained intact, and the Baltimore Skipjacks dropped out. The three remaining teams were joined by the Erie Golden Blades (the same Erie team that had jumped to the AHL when the EHL folded), the Hampton Roads Gulls, and the Nashville South Stars. The Hampton Roads Gulls folded before the season completed, but the rest survived.

Over the summer of 1983, the Virginia Raiders changed their name again, to become the Virginia Lancers. For the 1984-85 season they remained in Vinton and kept their name, making that the first season in its six year history in which the team did not either relocate, change its name, change leagues, or have the league it played in change names. This period of stability would last until 1987, when the ACHL made an ill-fated attempt to merge with the Midwestern Continental Hockey League to form the All-American Hockey League. The AAHL lasted all of year, and the only teams that survived to see the 1988-89 season were the Lancers, the Carolina Thunders (who, as previously noted, are today's Wheeling Nailers), and the Johnstown Chiefs (who, predictably enough, are today's Johnstown Chiefs).

A Brief History of the East Coast Hockey League

These three teams formed the East Coast Hockey League in 1988, and the owners of these league created two new teams to join them: the Erie Panthers (today's Baton Rouge Kingfish) and the Knoxville Cherokees (today's Pee Dee Pride).

The Lancers renamed themselves the Roanoke Valley Rebels in 1990 in honor of the Roanoke Valley Rebels of the Southern Hockey League. That named lasted for two seasons before the team renamed itself the Roanoke Valley Rampage for the 1992-93 season. This season was an unmitigated disaster for the Rampage.

The Blizzard of '93: In March of 1993, life in Southwest and Central Virginia skidded to a halt as up to 50 inches of snow fell on the East Coast. From the busiest interstate to the smallest back road, the situation was the same. In some places the only way to get food and supplies to stranded motorists was through the air and in some places drifting snow kept roads impassable for nearly a week. Thousands of people were stranded-- about a hundred were stuck for 24 hours inside Big Walker Mountain Tunnel. Between the heavy snow and high winds, trees toppled and power lines snapped, leaving thousands of people who made it home without power. In some places the lights didn't come back on for days. The same heavy snow that dropped power lines also dropped the roofs of several buildings. In Vinton, the roof of the Lancerlot collapsed during the Roanoke Valley Rampage's last game of the season. The roof at the Stanley Furniture outlet in Roanoke collapsed as well. Near Bluefield five Norfolk Southern engines and six car-carriers jumped the track and plunged down an embankment. Dozens of people, from Florida to Maine were killed by the storm. Roanoke's Memorial Hospital alone treated nearly 100 people with storm-related injuries.

The team set (and still holds) new league (ECHL) records in several categories, none of them good. They earned records for lowest winning percentage, season (.227), fewest wins, season (14), most losses in a season (49), fewest ties (1), longest winless streak (16), longest road winless streak (26), fewest road wins (2), most road losses (29), and set the all-time ECHL record for low attendance (also yet to be broken, although the short lived Miami Matadors only averaged eight fans more per game).

By the end of the season, the Rampage was playing to crowds so small that sometimes the number of players on both teams was greater then the number of people watching the game. As if all this wasn't enough, the arena the team played in collapsed in a blizzard with one game left in the regular season, and trapped much of the teams’ equipment under the rubble!

The Rampage rescheduled its final home game to be played on the road at the Scope in Norfolk, borrowing practically an entire team to play that game (the Admirals provided sticks and other equipment, the league provided some old Winston-Salem Thunderbird jerseys for the players to wear, and according to some of the people in attendance, many of the players for that game were volunteers from the adult league in Norfolk who filled in the spots left by players who had gotten fed up and gone home for the summer!)

The team immediately began making plans to find a new home, finally settling on Huntsville, Alabama, where the team became known as the Huntsville Blast.

Attendance in Huntsville, while better than what the team had seen the previous season, was still nothing to write home about. It remains as the fourth lowest in the history of the ECHL. So the team moved once again, this time landing in Tallahassee in the summer of 1994 to become the Tiger Sharks.

Oh, and in case you're wondering what three teams in minor league hockey are older then the Tiger Sharks, they are:

1. The Hershey Bears of the AHL (1938)
2. The Rochester Americans of the AHL (1955)
3. The Milwaukee Admirals of the AHL (1977)

The Tallahassee Tiger Sharks and the Vicious Fishes webmaster would like to thank S.D. Rhodes for contributing to this article about the most interesting history of our storied franchise.

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