Ice sports, including figure skating, hockey, curling and even broomball, provide this community with sports tourism and activities for locals.
There are a lot of things that make Huntsville a unique city for the South. But there might be nothing quite as unexpected as the enthusiasm for ice hockey. The support goes back decades, when Huntsville was a much smaller city, before the national hockey championships.
For me, my love of ice hockey began when I was about seven years old and my mom was taking my brother, me and two of our friends and their mom to go rollerskating. Fortunately that day the Rainbow Roller Rink was closed so my mom said she had heard there was an ice rink in town, near Fred Sington’s Sporting Goods on Governors Drive where Long John Silvers used to be. So, off we went to the ice rink. My mom, being from Montgomery, had never ice skated before, and I’m sure had never seen an ice rink either and certainly didn’t know how to tie skates or know what a skate key was. So, there was a nice man there, James, who we got to know over the years who initially tied our skates very tightly as he was famous for doing. We did not do very well skating, but our parents signed all of us up for figure skating lessons. After about a year, we decided to sign up to play hockey. That would last a lifetime. I was involved with hockey as a player or referee from 1973 until I retired as an NCAA Division I Hockey official in 2016 and then retired completely two years later. But the question is, how did Hockey get popular in Huntsville? Even today, Havoc games are always packed and often sold out.repeatedly set records for season attendance in the Southern Professional Hockey LeagueBack in the early 1960’s, IBM transferred workers here to work on the Apollo space program. One of them was Fred Hudson who ended up coaching, playing, and refereeing years and was the Founding Father of Huntsville Hockey. Fred spent countless hours at the ice teaching and promoting hockey and was recognized by USA Hockey for his many accomplishments. A young attorney named Joe Ritch was also instrumental in promotion of hockey by being the first coach and founder for the hockey team of the University of Alabama in Huntsville. UAH grew from a club team to a team that won two NCAA Division II National Championships and competed in Division I for many years and had record crowds spurred on by the 1980 Olympic Gold Medal Team. Those first club teams consisted of mostly local players with a few players who moves down here for work. Several of the players played for well-respected college hockey teams. UAH was the forerunner to the various professional teams who have come and gone until the tremendous success of the Havoc. Ice sports, including figure skating, hockey, curling and even broomball, provide this community with sports tourism and activities for locals. But it’s more than that. Hockey and its legacy has helped shaped this fast-growing city, by drawing people to Huntsville, from Canada and the Northeast and from around the country. There have been three players who have made it to the NHL and one current player who is a goalie for the Detroit Red Wings, Cam Talbot. Nic Dowd is a Huntsville born player who is with the Washington Capital and Jared Ross, was with the Philadelphia Flyers and was the first Alabama born player to score a playoff goal. But there’s also a wide array of those former UAH Hockey alumni who stayed in Huntsville, including doctors, lawyers, firefighters, bankers, finance, accountants and engineers. These former players have added a great deal to the fabric of the Huntsville community. In 2002, UAH Professor Niles Schoening did an economic impact study on the UAH alumni in Huntsville. He found that former UAH alumni hockey players had purchased over $100 million in real estate in Madison County. Many of the players married local women, had children who they raised here and coached their athletic teams, and are very valuable members of the community. It was also a great talking point whenever I was in school in Virginia and later Boston, and found myself around hockey people, they would always say: “Oh, we know about Alabama-Huntsville.” So, the next time you are at a Havoc game or go to the Preds in Nashville, you will know a little bit about The Hockey Capital of the South.Doug Martinson publishes View from the Top, a column from AL.com about big ideas for Huntsville, it's history and what comes next as the city continues to expand. Martinson is an attorney at Martinson and...
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