Rob McCaig reached celebrity status with the Louisiana IceGators back in the 1990s as the quickest to brawl. So when Service Chevrolet needed a player to drive a new dually truck out on the ice for a promotion during a game at The Cajundome, he got invited to be behind the wheel.
Not a problem, he said. He was, after all, suspended at the time.
But quickly he ran into a problem.
When McCaig turned the truck to get on the ice, he turned too soon, hit the wall and damaged the truck. He can still remember the worried look on the face of Service Chevrolet owner Jesse Luquette, who was seated just behind the glass on the front row.
The truck didn’t go home with a lucky fan that night, but it had a better fate. McCaig, the story goes, actually autographed the damaged section of the truck. The dealership then sold it for $3,000 more than the asking price.
“I didn’t believe it, but they told me the guy who bought it left it that way,” said McCaig, a Canadian who spent two years with the IceGators. “That’s how fanatic people were around here. It was absolutely nuts.”
It’s been 28 years since the IceGators first dropped a puck in Lafayette, but ask people who were part of those first seasons and the memories remain vivid. Hockey was about as common in south Louisiana back then as boudin and cracklins at a corner gas station in Minnesota, but for a few seasons the team was a runaway success.
The IceGators in the first four seasons often sold out The Cajundome and set league attendance records that remain today, peaking at just under 11,500 fans a game in the 1996-97 season. They drew about double the league average, all while being in the league’s fourth-smallest market. Twice it averaged more fans per game than the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes.
Of the 10 most-attended games in the 35-year history of the East Coast Hockey League, seven are IceGators games. The team was featured in Sports Illustrated and on the Canadian Broadcasting Co. And they were good, making the championship their second season and the playoffs in nine of their 10 seasons.
Jady Regard, now chief nut officer at Cane River Pecan Co. in New Iberia, was 26 when he was hired as the team’s public relations director. The local economy and the sports landscape at the time, he recalled, was key reasons behind the team’s success.
And the entertainment at the games — Elvis nights, Gator Girls, the smoke, the big head and everything else — also drew people to the Cajundome.
“The oil industry was doing great,” said Regard, who later became general manager. “Everybody had jobs, and the town was doing great. And the sports teams in the area — USL football, LSU football, Saints football — all sucked. So everyone just said, ‘Let’s go put some money in this thing for a while.’ And we took full advantage of it.
“When the Dome was full, it was hard to beat the atmosphere. We quickly became the place to be on any given home game. There was a specialness that happened here that just wasn’t happening anywhere else.”
The ride did not last forever. Attendance slowly dwindled, and the team left after the 2004-05 season. Today you can find about a dozen of former players still in the Lafayette area. McCaig, the son of a dairy farmer who grew up outside of Edmonton, returned after his playing days were over, married a local girl and never left.
Chris Valicevic, Joe Mittelsteadt and others remained as well.
The beginning
The team got league approval in the spring of 1995, and by that fall it had a roster full of players and were ready to play. Local ownership of Bob Wright, Logan Nichols and Ernest Parker teamed up with Canadian brothers Dave and Tim Berryman, and they hired Doug Shedden as the first coach.
That season began with a 10-game road trip since LAGCOE had already booked the building those dates. Longtime journalist Bobby Ardoin got the assignment to staff the first game on Nov. 5, 1995, despite not knowing anything about hockey. Fans filled the arena that first game, he recalled.
“I thought I’d be able to park anywhere in the Cajundome parking lot — Oh, no, I couldn’t find a parking place,” said Ardoin, now 75. “It was one of the most amazing first-game experiences that I’ve ever had. The crowd was just electric. A lot of them probably knew as much about ice hockey as I did, but they really got into it from the first puck drop.”
That first game served as a tutorial for fans, said Craig Wall, a longtime Lafayette radio voice who was there. During intermissions the Cajundome scoreboards would explain rules of the game. When calls were made, explanations were given.
That first game was not a sellout, he recalled, but excitement caught on.
“Lafayette loves whatever is new,” Wall said. “It wasn’t just a game. The fast pace of it, and there were a lot of lights and spectacle. They made entertainment out of it. It connected with people. As fans became more knowledgeable, then they really started catching on to it. In year 2, you couldn’t get a ticket. It was the hottest ticket in town.”
The success overflowed beyond ticket sales. Players were doing promotions for local businesses. McCaig’s wife, Emily, noted how youth league baseball attendance dropped by almost 50% as kids discovered hockey. Fans followed the team to road games.
Barrett Boudreaux, now a dietician at Acadia St. Landry Hospital, introduced himself to a girl, Danielle, at one game at an event for season-ticket holders and later connected with her in an AOL chat room for IceGators fans. They met again at a game and later got their own season tickets.
They’ve now been married for 25 years and have a daughter.
“I liked hockey, and I was always a big fan of Wayne Gretzky,” Boudreaux said. “But for it to be in Louisiana was just kind of surreal because I had never been to a hockey game or experienced the Zamboni and all of that stuff. What sets Lafayette apart from other areas is when we love something, we love it hard. We are die-hard whatever it is, and we stick together.”
For more: Check out these action photos from the IceGators’ early seasons.
The team was good
The team went 43-21 that first season but lost in the opening round of the playoffs. By year 2, the team started 9-0 before the league ruled it had an ineligible player during that stretch and had to forfeit all nine wins.
Shedden was a big factor behind the team’s quick rise, Regard noted, as he brought a rough brand of hockey with a lot of fighting. He was so intense, Ardoin recalled, that he would often drop f-bombs during postgame interviews while KATC’s and KLFY’s cameras rolled.
McCaig’s 512 penalty minutes in that first season remains an ECHL record. The league once suspended him for 10 games and fined him $1,000 with a stipulation that he was to pay it with a personal check.
Joe Mittelsteadt, a native of British Columbia who played that one season with the IceGators, said that team — unlike many rosters in minor league sports that is focused on player development — was designed to win.
“That team was put together for one reason and one reason only — to win everything,” he said. “When we came in that season, they pretty well told all of us, ‘Look, this team will not be together more than one year.’ It was our shot, and a lot of us had played together or against each other throughout the year. We gelled pretty early.”
The IceGators’ record officially was 38-28-4 but were 27-7-1 at The Cajundome. They rolled through the playoffs and advanced to the Kelly Cup finals, only to lose the best-of-seven series 4-1 to South Carolina.
Mittelsteadt recalled how the heat in the Cajundome — the series was held in mid-May — made for harrowing conditions on the ice. The team also ran into a hot goalie, McCaig said, and a good defensive squad.
The IceGators advanced to the finals again in 1999-2000 but lost again. By then the attendance began to dwindle. By the end of the 2004-05 season, a group of fans who pooled their money together to buy the team bailed. The league had to take over the team to end the season, and no investors came forward.
“At the end of the day, as successful as we were,” Regard said, “I believe that because the game was not rooted in our community — meaning so many people didn’t play it as a youngster — there was kind of an appreciation gap. I think it finally caught up with us.”
But the story didn’t end there. Many of the players returned to Lafayette and remain today. McCaig left after that second season and played five more seasons elsewhere, including for teams in Lake Charles and Baton Rouge, but returned to Lafayette when he retired.
He landed a job at Superior Energy, which was a big IceGators supporter, and remains in the oil and gas business today. He met his wife on a blind date arranged by the of his host family. They’ve been married 17 years and have two children.
“I always said to myself if I ever settled down somewhere this would be a good spot,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Canada, but it’s different people up there. If you go out east, it’s different. I’ve been all over the world, and this is where I chose to come back to. It’s a pretty cool place.”
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