AAHL, MWHL announce merger

EVANSVILLE, Ind. – Just days after it had announced its 2009-2010 schedule, the All American Hockey League announced that it was expanding from five teams to six and in the process squared away a situation that could have turned into a territorial battle. Late Monday afternoon, the AAHL sent out a release announcing that it had come to a mutual agreement with Wade Stuckey and his fledgling Mid-West Hockey League to combine forces in one organization. The AAHL now will have free reign to expand throughout the upper Midwest without having to fight with the MWHL for cities and markets. “We’ve been talking to him (Stuckey) for a long time and I didn’t think it was going to go but now it is going to go because they only had one team one-hundred percent ready to roll,” AAHL Commissioner Bob Langdon said. “We were going to try to work together and try not to hurt each other too much when really there was only room for one (league). It only makes sense to have one and that’s why we tried to merge earlier and things weren’t working out. This solidifies everything that we were hoping for originally and we’ll have the whole upper Midwest area and expand a little more east next year.” The MWHL’s one team, the Madison Ice Muskies in Wisconsin, now joins the Battle Creek Revolution, Chicago Blaze, Chi-Town Shooters, Detroit Hitmen and Evansville IceMen as the sixth franchise. Stuckey and MWHL official Matt Crawford will also become part of the picture as Stuckey will be Supervisor of Officials while Crawford takes over as Executive Director of Operations. “We are pleased that all parties were able to work together to make this happen,” Crawford said in the release. “All the issues that we were facing and preventing a merger have been corrected and now we can move forward in a positive manner.” According to Evansville General Manager Chip Rossetti, the merger talks seemed to be all but dead last week when the AAHL released its schedule but picked up again on Friday. “For about two months I guess, we had been in talks with the possibility of doing this. Honestly, we weren’t able to get the deal closed and as of last week we were under the impression that the deal was dead so we announced five teams and released our schedule,” Rossetti said. “They called us on Friday and they asked if we could still have some discussions and we said we can keep discussing it but we wanted to knock it out real quick. We didn’t want to wait another two months because we did have a schedule out and if we were going to have to redo the schedule, we wanted to get it out right away. There were some ongoing discussions over the weekend and ultimately we had a conference call this morning to officially take a vote on it and we went ahead and decided that we would approve the merger.” The merger ends Stuckey’s two year battle to get the MWHL off the ground. Originally slated to open play a year ago, the MWHL could only get one franchise in Indianapolis close to ready. Stuckey decided to take a year to regroup, leaving the league website active as a reminder that they would try again. This time around, the Indy franchise failed to launch but Stuckey did successfully put a team in Madison where the University of Wisconsin Badgers garner the most attention. It is expected that the Ice Muskies will play at the Hartmeyer Ice Arena in Madison. A second announced MWHL team in Fort Wayne, Indiana was not able to get off the ground due to financial concerns. Rossetti said that only minor tweaking would have to be done to redo the schedule, increasing the total number of games for each team from 44 to 48. With the Blaze and Shooters just two and three hours away from Madison respectively, Rossetti expects that the addition of the Ice Muskies will create more rivalries as well as making sure every team will play every weekend. “It is actually going to work out better because now we won’t have to have a team having a Friday or Saturday off every weekend. We’re going to be able to have more Fridays and Saturdays and fewer Sundays and weekday game,” he said. “I think its going to be great for the fans to be able to travel to more of the away games and just be able to do more day trips.” Everyone involved is in agreement that the merger will easily allow for more expansion. The AAHL has already announced its intent to develop franchises in New York and New Jersey next season in hopes of building an eastern division. Further expansion is also being looked at for the 2011-2012 season. “We have several ownership groups and venues interested in joining the AAHL,” Stuckey said in the release. “We will do our due diligence to match those who meet our criteria and our vision of single-A hockey.” Contact the author at don.money@prohockeynews.com