COLUMBUS, GA – Under normal circumstances, you’d never expect snakes and tigers and eagles to be able to work together. Nature never intended them to. Leave it to two teams of hockey-playing humans to defy Mother Nature.
Earlier this year, the Columbus Cottonmouths, a professional team, entered into an agreement to share its home, the Columbus Civic Center, with the club team from Auburn University. Both squads will use the larger Civic Center until a new ice rink being built next to the Civic Center is completed early in 2011. 
The Tigers, who are members of the Southeastern Conference Hockey Conference (SECHC) and the American Collegiate Hockey Association (ACHA), will use the new rink for home games and practices.
“I’m happy they have a hockey team. It’s good for hockey in the south,” Columbus coach and general manager Jerome Bechard. “With the new rink, we need to put people in the building and use the ice over there. That will take some ice time over there and that’s the main concern.”
This is not the first time that ice hockey has invaded the plains of Auburn, Alabama. Back in 1980, the Tigers iced a team that battled the likes of Georgia Tech, North Carolina, Duke and Alabama-Huntsville. Three years later, the program disbanded.
27 years later, Elliott Changer and Justin Nabors are seeing their combined efforts come to reality. The two met on the Auburn campus with nothing but a wish to play hockey in college to unite them. Nabors, a sixth-year senior and assistant captain, said that the road to restoring hockey to AU was a long process, much of which is not understandable to most people.
“Me and Elliott have been trying to set up a team for four years. We ran into some difficulties along the road but I’m stoked,” Nabors said. “This is a dream come true. I’ve been waiting to play hockey in college for a long time.”
Club President and Head Coach Mike Robinson echoed Nabors’ explanation of the long and winding road to icing a team, starting with simply finding out if there was enough interest within the student body. Being that it is a club team, there are no scholarships available and players have to be already enrolled at the university.
“Just to get the team put together, we had to get a petition with approximately 100 names,” Robinson said. “Once we got chartered, we sent an email to those 100 email addresses seeing who was interested. We had 70 people who were interested and from those 70 we dwindled it down to about 20 players.”
The team then needed a coach and Robinson, who had been named advisor by the university, became the one and only candidate based on his background.
“We found out that coaches or anybody involved with the club team had to be a student, staff or faculty member at the university,” Robinson said. “As club president, I let them know that I had coaching experience and that I am USA Hockey certified. I threw my name in and the officers decided that instead of spending the time and effort (of conducting a search), they named me coach.”
The next step was to find a home arena. Pelham, Alabama 
would have been a natural choice but the building there already hosts the University of Alabama squad. With Columbus being just 45 minutes drive from campus, they approached the Civic Center and the Cottonmouths and found nothing but support.
“In our mind, we were always set to come to the Civic Center. Honestly, the Civic Center had just as much enthusiasm about us coming here as we did,” Robinson said. “The relationship with the Cottonmouths is more of a joint relationship with the Civic Center. We’ve had Jerome Bechard in for a couple of meetings to give us some advice and some pointers on how we can run game day operations. It’s a partnership we hope we can build upon in the future.”
Robinson is well aware of the fact that ice hockey in the South is more of an acquired taste than a natural point of migration for players and fans. He sees the Auburn team as just the next step in the evolutionary process.
“It’s (college hockey) going to work. The reason is that youth hockey is starting to become more prevalent in the South. We’re getting players from the south as well as the north,” he said. “These kids come to college and may think that they won’t have the opportunity to play college hockey. With leagues like the SECHC, we have all of the SEC schools and it’s competitive.”
Bechard, who has seen the rise of hockey in the South manifest itself in the success of the SPHL and the Columbus franchise, sees it as a great opportunity to reach out to student-athletes who want to play the game and get an education.
“There’s going to be a certain group they’re targeting to come see their games. It’s all about the school supporting the kids and the kids supporting the school,” Bechard said. “It gives another outlet for athletes to continue their careers. It keeps them out of trouble and gives them another outlet to continue playing hockey.”
The Auburn team made its debut at the Columbus Civic Center on Friday, October 15th against Ole Miss. The contest was the second game of a doubleheader with a Cottonmouths exhibition game preceding it. Despite the post-10 p.m. start time, Robinson said the size of the crowd caught him by surprise.
“We knew we’d have a large crowd following the Cottonmouths but we were surprised with the numbers that stayed,” he said. “We thought people would trickle out because it was late at night. Honestly, a lot of people stayed for the whole game.”
Being a part of the SECHC, Auburn will have plenty of opportunities to channel the passions of sports fans with match-ups that will in many ways mirror those of the football schedule. One of those will be in January when the Tigers will travel to Pelham to battle the Crimson Tide in a three-game “Iron Cup” series fashioned after the always intense “Iron Bowl” football war that the two universities engage in every fall. The winners will receive a trophy and in-state bragging rights just like their gridiron brethren.
For their parts, the Civic Center and the Cottonmouths are charging ahead with two big college hockey events. On the weekend of November 20 & 21, the Civic Center will host the “College Hockey Clash”, 
a showcase of collegiate teams from the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, Clemson and Alabama. Saturday’s slate is actually a triple-header with college games at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. with the Cottonmouths taking on Huntsville in between at 5 p.m. Auburn will not participate this year because its team was not chartered at the time negotiations and scheduling were taking place.
Then, at the end of February, Columbus will play host to the SECHC hockey tournament where the top four teams in each division will battle for conference supremacy. Pelham played host to the first two tournaments but Columbus’ bid for the 2011 event won out over Pelham, Nashville, Columbia, South Carolina and Savannah.
The SECHC tournament is a big goal for the Tigers but for now they are just happy to be able to don a jersey with the Auburn logo.
“It feels amazing. It’s one of those things you can look back on and say I’m glad I got to experience it,” Nabors said. “Along with school, you get the education and you get to do the athletics as well.”
Which is a win-win situation for everyone.
Contact the author at lee.marion@prohockeynews.com
