Starkville is far from Mystery, Alaska, and the towns’ temperatures show an even greater disparity, so local hockey players have to skate on a converted tennis court instead of a frozen lake.
The teams of the Starkville Inline Hockey League have played their way through two-thirds of the league’s first season, president Richard Wright said. Incidentally, two-thirds of the teams will make the postseason, putting the total number of playoff teams at two.
“We’ve just got three teams in the league,” Wright said. “But the top two teams play a two-out-of-three best-of series. Then we’ll crown a champion for our first season.”
Wright, a native of the Toronto area, represents a portion of the league that has veteran players, but a significant percentage of the participants have been getting their first real dose the sport. Such a range of player ability would seemingly lower the quality of the games, but he says that hasn’t been the case.
“We’ve had great hockey,” Wright said. “You’d be surprised at some of the guys that have really improved in the past three months. It’s awesome to see the improvement in the younger guys-guys from the South, especially.”
While Starkville may have produced a few hockey players, it certainly never produced a rink until the SIHL got to work. League founders met with city officials, who granted the league an unused tennis court at Moncrief Park. The players spent the summer turning the court into a rink and have been maintaining it since then.
Co-founder Charlie Hill hails from Picayune, where he began playing pickup hockey on basketball courts six years ago. When he moved to Starkville his freshman year in high school, he continued playing on the old tennis courts of McKee Park.
“We had probably 10 to 15 guys getting together to play hockey,” Hill said. “I’d call them up and say, ‘Hey, we’re playing hockey today,’ and they’d come out and say that we had 10 to 15 guys anyway, so we might as well make a league. In a college town, there’s bound to be some hockey players in here.”
Twenty-four players now make up the league, and they have been divided into Ducks, Bruins and Sharks, with the Ducks and Bruins apparently headed to a postseason clash.
Richard Sewell, who worked to make the SIHL an official league, learned the game in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Since then, he’s lived in Detroit and Knoxville, but he says Starkville has its plusses.
“You play in bigger cities, and you very rarely get a chance to play with high-caliber players,” Sewell said. “That’s one of the advantages to this format in a small place like this.”
“We have such a range-from people like me who are old and dilapidated with some experience to young guys that have been playing semi-professional hockey to brand new kids-all playing on the same rink,” Sewell added.
Sewell said that the level of play and intensity gets better every week.
Shortly after the fall season ends, the league will begin a new term in the spring. Sewell says he hopes the league can add at least two teams during spring registration.