Love Hockey? Join the Club : No Lockout in the PCHA, Where Budgets Are Tight and the Play Is Intense

It’s almost 10:30 p.m., and they haven’t finished the second period yet. That wouldn’t be a problem in the NHL, but it’s a major concern when you’re paying hard-earned cash for 90 minutes of ice time and the meter is threatening to run out before the game does.

After each shift, as players from the Orange Coast College hockey club gasp for breath, they sneak anxious glances at the clock above the goal.

“Hey, you have to give us extra time because the door got stuck,” Phil Bahler of Orange Coast yells to no one in particular. The superintendents of the Culver City rink can’t hear him. They’re in their offices. They know better than to venture into the frigid rink, where the fans watching Orange Coast play USC on a recent Monday night huddle under blankets and wrap their fingers around cups of steaming coffee.

“You owe us,” Bahler continues. “C’mon, the door got stuck twice, and we lost 10 minutes. You owe us.”

The hockey gods must be listening. No one tells Bahler they can stay on the ice, but no one drives the Zamboni out to chase them off. To squeeze in the last period, the teams agree to play without stopping the clock until the timekeeper decides otherwise for the last two minutes. Orange Coast players complain that he’s secretly wearing USC colors under his layers of clothing, but he remains impassive as Orange Coast holds on for a 6-3 victory.

This is the Pacific Collegiate Hockey Assn., a loosely organized league of club hockey teams that embraces 10 schools from San Jose to San Diego. In the PCHA, you learn that time costs money, and you often have to make up the rules as you go along.

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It’s not great hockey. Most players are Easterners or Canadians who played in youth leagues but gave up when they realized they had no professional futures. California-bred players couldn’t make Division I teams because they didn’t have top-notch coaches to push them when they were young and because the hockey boom touched off by Wayne Gretzky’s arrival in Los Angeles hadn’t filtered down to their level.

Yet, competition in the PCHA is intense and the skill level is respectable, considering most clubs subsist on budgets that make practice a rare luxury at upward of $250 per hour for ice time.

USC players pay $350 a season for the privilege of skating before sparse crowds at Culver City on Monday nights at 9. The school’s recreation club council contributed $4,000 and players raised $4,000 themselves.

“On a bare minimum shoestring budget, we need $17,000 to operate, and that includes three road trips without staying in a hotel,” said Derek Magdalik, the club’s president, general manager and most energetic promoter.

Whittier College, which revived its club this season and is playing some games against PCHA teams, gives its skaters $4,500. Orange Coast, relegated to playing home games on Saturdays at 10:15 p.m. at the Ice Capades Chalet in Costa Mesa, gets limited funding from the school but gets a van for northern trips. A donor supplied the Pirates’ classy black and red jerseys.

UCLA, which usually plays at Burbank’s Pickwick Arena on Fridays at 8:45 p.m. or Saturdays at 10:15 p.m., charges dues of $300. The school kicks in $2,600, which does not come from the athletic department budget.

In contrast, at the University of Minnesota, a Division I varsity hockey team, the operating budget for expenses such as supplies and travel is about $400,000. That doesn’t include the cost of 18 scholarships or coaches’ salaries.

But what they lack in polish, PCHA players, coaches and administrators make up for in dedication.

USC Coach Mark Wilbur, who played for the Trojans a decade ago, laced up his first pair of hockey skates when he was 5. “I played until I decided I wanted to read and write,” joked Wilbur, whose father owned a triple-A hockey team in St. Paul, Minn. “I came to SC to play golf, and then I found out they had a club hockey team. I quit to play club hockey. My friends thought I was nuts, but once a hockey fanatic, always a hockey fanatic.”

Dressed in a dark suit befitting the downtown accountant he is by day, Wilbur stands on a wooden bench during the Trojans’ game against Orange Coast and coaxes his players to backcheck and hit opponents. He is drained after USC’s loss and is startled to realize it’s after 11 p.m.

“I’m in the office at 7 a.m. Seven a.m. comes awfully early some mornings,” he said.

Orange Coast goaltender Derek Walker, who was born in Nova Scotia, has spent at least $3,000 on equipment. That’s in addition to club dues and traveling expenses.

“It’s a hobby,” said Walker, who works at a packing and crating company to support his hockey habit. “But it’s something we take really seriously. We’re representing our school and we’re working real hard.”

As Magdalik points out, the PCHA boasts another unique attraction. As long as the NHL lockout drags on, he says, “We’re the only game in town.”

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Compared to college hockey, the NHL is a newcomer to the West Coast. Hockey was a varsity sport at USC in the 1930s but died in the early ‘40s. It was also popular at Stanford and Cal, where it remains a strong club sport. U.S. International University in San Diego had a Division I program until it was overwhelmed by the costs of travel, ice time and insurance.

Over the years, as operating and insurance costs skyrocketed, rinks closed and college hockey faded away. A forerunner of the PCHA was born in the early ‘70s, but it was a renegade league. Players looked suspiciously old to be students. Teams entered the league and abruptly disbanded.

Stability is still a missing link. Long Beach State was to play in the PCHA’s Southern Division this season with UC San Diego, San Diego State and Orange Coast but pulled out with little warning, and Pepperdine folded its team in mid-November. That’s still not as crazy as what happened a year ago. Whittier was in, then it was out. Then St. Mary’s unexpectedly withdrew. What was schedule-maker Bahler to do?

“We turned around and put University of the Pacific in. That wasn’t too bad,” he said. “But then Northridge played two or three games, got into a bench-clearing brawl and got into trouble with the ice rink (Iceoplex in Van Nuys). They were asked not to come back and they dropped out. We had a disaster last year.”

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Auburn Taylor, a Van Nuys insurance executive, has made it his personal mission to clean up PCHA’s act. From his initial involvement as a hockey parent through his years as president of the Southern California Amateur Hockey Assn., he was convinced there was a place for college hockey in the crowded sports landscape.

His first task after being elected the PCHA’s president last summer was to restore an aura of legitimacy to the league.

“As played here on the West Coast, it became almost like playing pickup games. Anybody could play,” he said. “Schools had their code of ethics and the clubs were allowed to exist because the student body wanted it.

“Most of the schools that have clubs, these kids want to have more recognition and more sensible activities. They just want to have a better program. That’s one of the reasons I prevailed, because I believed in the necessity of building strong rules and living with them.”

Taylor enlisted 11 schools this season and gave others probationary status to test their commitment. Bahler created three divisions and crafted a 94-game schedule that runs from Oct. 7 through March 25. A champion will be determined through playoffs, and those games will feature 20-minute periods. Teams during the regular season sometimes play 12-minute periods when they can’t afford more ice time.

To help defray the cost of equipment, which is the biggest expense, Taylor is courting corporate sponsors. For the first time, the Kings are promising to help by sending their coaches to a clinic of league coaches sometime this season.

But every gain comes slowly for the PCHA, and there are many steps backward. USC and UCLA were to play at the Forum on Nov. 17 after the Kings faced the Buffalo Sabres, but the NHL lockout wiped out that game and, with it, the schools’ hope for wide exposure. They met at Pickwick Arena on Nov. 18, the eve of their schools’ annual football game, and drew about 900.

“(Getting recognition) is a real uphill battle,” said Nathan Brandstater, a fourth-year chemistry major at UCLA and assistant captain. “We’re all full-time students and some of us work, too. We get some support from the university, but we don’t have the staff to handle advertising and PR. It’s tough to try to sell tickets and have people say, ‘I didn’t know we have a hockey team.’ ”

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If players and fans knew college hockey were alive here, would they care?

Taylor believes they would.

“My main thing now with the PCHA is to clean up its entire image, to create a strong program and get the community involved where the teams are located,” he said. “We want to get students to want to attend games.

“My vision for the PCHA is I want to have Nevada, Oregon, Washington and maybe even Arizona join. All of them are club (teams) now and they’re playing in all kinds of funny ways. If a schedule is done for them, it’s more organized. As a league, all these things would be done.

“Maybe by 1999, it would compel a school to say, ‘Maybe we ought to try Division I and build a rink.’ There are great pluses for that.”

Magdalik also sees a vast potential audience. He cites the University of Arizona, which nearly fills its 6,850-seat rink and has a recruiting program. Arizona is ranked first in the American Collegiate Hockey Assn., the governing body for club-level teams. The ACHA divides teams into tiers based on skill. Arizona is in the top tier; PCHA teams are in Tier 2.

“My goal is to get us into Tier 1, and with our new coach (Wilbur), I think that’s going to happen,” Magdalik said.

Taylor insists the game will sell itself, and that success for the PCHA is only a matter of making people aware it’s there.

“If college hockey was anywhere near the popularity and scope it is in the East, it would be totally different here. We’d have publicity and TV games,” Taylor said. “I’m sure that will happen here. It will get there.”