Playing Through

With a handful of games remaining in the regular season, the Austin Ice Bats are gunning for the playoffs. Frankly, I think they're setting the bar a little low.

The Bats haven't made the Central Hockey League playoffs since 2003. They've never won the league championship. Through the first of the year, they were scraping the bottom of the barrel, with a 7–22-1 record. Since then, they've been on a tear, winning 16 of 23 games as of last Friday.

But I see a glory even greater than a league championship. I see the stuff Will Ferrell movies are made of.

Maybe it's the arena they play in. "Hey," I asked Brien Rea, the team's media relations/play-by-play/PA guy, during a break in the action against the Amarillo Gorillas on Friday, Feb. 29, "what's the deal with ..."

"With the crappiest arena in the history of hockey?"

That wasn't my question, actually. But, yeah, since Rea brought it up, what is the deal with the Chaparral Ice Arena? This is a professional franchise, after all, valued at more than a million dollars. They're in their 12th season. And they're playing on a roller rink, practically. I mean, it has ice and all but not enough seats to turn a profit.

Thinking the team had an inside track on an arena in Cedar Park, it pulled the ice plant out of its old arena, the Travis County Expo Center. But the deal fell through.

A few weeks before the season, it was looking like the Bats might just pack it in. Or at least sit out for the year, hoping to regroup for the following season.

Randy Sanders bought the franchise in September and immediately began looking for a new home. "If you put the right mix together," he says, "you can bake a cake."

A cupcake, anyway.

"I understood that it would lose money this year, but I wanted to keep the franchise alive," says Sanders, who has only been on the ice once in his life, for a team photo. "My goal is to turn it into affordable family entertainment. We have all the ingredients. We've got sumo wrestling on ice. We've got our Pelvis Elvis contest."

They also have a bunch of amiable Canadians who seemed to have accepted, even embraced, playing before only a few hundred fans in the Chaparral Ice Arena.

"After we lost in Corpus Christi on New Year's Eve, a bunch of guys went out and got drunk," Rea said. "Maybe I shouldn't say this, but they puked all over the bus on the way home. It's like they puked up the first half of the season. Ever since, they've been a different team. They're playing because they love the game. Nobody is going to make it to the NHL. We have no prospects. We know that. But you know what? We're making it work."

They're making it work the way a sublimely half-assed Will Ferrell movie works.

And that works for me.