Now Boarding: A Hockey Team

I'm not sure what else can be said or done for the Pederal Prospects Hockey League to save the league and its member teams from itself. The schedule was released on Friday to little fanfare despite the interest the league believes it has, and I went looking to see if the league was going to take baby steps forward with their newly-expanded map to help the financial situations of a number of teams. As stated, there are some massive distances between franchises this season that a bus ride simply won't cover based on time.

I went digging through the schedule, and one series jumped out at me almost immediately. The Danbury Hat Tricks, located in Danbury, Connecticut, host the Stockton Thunder on March 26 and 27 in a weekend series. Nothing about that should be surprising as it makes sense financially to have teams located 2930 miles apart play multiple games against one another in one trip. Crossing four time zones isn't easy, so you'd expect Stockton to get some "adjustment" time when it comes to bodies adjusting for the time difference, right?

Except you already know that's not the case with the FPHL.

Stockton inexplicably hosts the as-yet-unnamed Oceanside franchise on Wednesday, March 24 in what will be an evening-scheduled game, meaning they will likely need to charter a plane for the trip to Connecticut for the Friday contest against Danbury. There are no commercial flights that fly directly into Danbury that leave from Stockton, and the closest solution would be to Hartford. There is no direct flight from Stockton to Hartford, so the team will need to fly from San Francisco if a direct commercial flight is wanted.

Of course, it's possible that Stockton flies out to the east coast and spends a couple of weeks there playing against teams, but that's also not the case in looking at the schedule. Stockton is due back for April 2 when they host the Indiana Sentinels, and I doubt they're going to be taking a 43-hour bus trip back home after playing the Hat Tricks. The FPHL just went from a bus league to a national league that requires plane travel in one summer due to inexplicable decisions.

If you're thinking, "This is a mess," you're not alone on that.

If you're the Minnesota Northern Lights franchise, you have to hope that every game sells out with the number of California trips that the team will make. According to the schedule, Minnesota visits Oceanside on October 23 and 25. They do not visit either of Stockton or Fresno on that trip. Minnesota returns to California to play Stockton on November 25 before playing Fresno on November 27 and 28, but they don't visit Oceanside on that trip. The Northern Lights then go home to play Stockton on December 4 and 5 before going back to Fresno for games on December 11 and 12, but they don't visit Stockton or Oceanside in that visit. Who is designing this schedule?

Unless this league has a pile of new investors with deep pockets, the scheduling for the FPHL is ludicrous. Seemingly intelligent road trips are ignored and additional unnecessary travel is scheduled all over the place despite the FPHL specifically saying they'd do what they could to reduce unnecessary travel in a previous press release.

Just ignore that part of the press release because they really didn't mean it. They only published it for optics. Unnecessary travel is, apparently, necessary, especially for the Frontier Division teams.

We saw two teams leave the FPHL after the proposal of this California experiment, and I suspect there may be more teams who question the necessity of including California if it blows up their travel budgets. Minnesota makes three trips to California in three months to play seven road games, and Stockton flies across the continental US for two road games before coming home. Make it make sense.

There may be far less "unnecessary travel" next season if FPHL teams fold or abandon the league this season due to rising costs. Is that worth the cost of an expansion experiment? I guess we'll find out!

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!