Will Brodie, former hockey correspondent for Fairfax Media, is completing a book about the 2014 AIHL season, titled: REALITY CHECK: Travels in the Australian Ice Hockey League, due for release shortly. Here is an excerpt from March: a lot happened before a puck was dropped in 2014!  In the upcoming weeks, more excerpts and off-cuts from the book will be featured here at theaihl.com.

For more words and pictures from the project and to keep up to date with its progress, go to facebook.com/realitycheckbook and visit his websitewillbrodie.com.

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Friday 7 March 2014
Canberra was one of the main reasons I wrote this book. I heard so much about its “feral” fans and the great atmosphere at its rink that I came up with the idea to travel to each AIHL venue and write about it. Melbourne Ice’s 2012 import defender Doug Wilson Jnr, told me - and the superb Threepeat documentary - that he came to Australia to experience the variety of small-time hockey in all its rawness. This meant outdoor bucket urinals at Gold Coast, and intimately delivered abuse in Canberra. When I assumed that highly skilled but diminutive Ice centre Jason Baclig would dislike the comparatively cramped confines of the Canberra rink, he put me straight, saying he enjoyed the challenge of playing on the smaller rink. Former Ice captain Vinnie Hughes told me of having bourbon thrown on him while he battled for a puck on the boards. He said it laughing. The Threepeat makers insisted it was a must-see rink. When I interviewed John Raut last year, he said he turned fans away at every home game and made money regardless of how the team was performing. He dreamed of opening up the venue to fit more of them in.

Visiting Canberra to watch the Knights became my priority, and when I expanded that desire into a plan to visit every rink, Canberra was the trip I thought of as the centrepiece. Why and how did the nation’s mild-mannered capital, artificially created, isolated, bureaucratic, home to administrative and political fly-ins, develop such a love for its hockey team? After the amazing events of the past week, my piqued curiosity has peaked.

The Canberra Knights are no more. All hail the AIHL’s newest team, Canberra (CBR) Brave.

Yesterday the other seven clubs, on the recommendation of the AIHL commissioners, voted to grant the new Canberra club a provisional licence. Within days of the Knights’ demise, a new team, with a potentially more democratic and sustainable structure, featuring new players and a remarkable $28,000-plus in donations - from as far afield as Norway and Canada - has been born. It is an entity created by Knights players, in a biblical three days, which retains the 2014 fixtures of the Knights. The show goes on, as planned, with eight teams, and only the reinstatement of a Queensland team needed to make the league truly national. (Sorry, Tasmania, but you need a full-sized rink first.)

The new club will wear the navy blue and yellow colours customary to its region and play out of the Knights’ former home, the Phillip Swimming and Ice Skating Centre. Four sponsors are lined up and soon to be released memberships are expected to be heavily subscribed, ensuring the entity can turn a profit in its first season. Allinsure director Peter Chamberlain and Jamie Wilson, owner-director of advertising agency Coordinate, are running the club after offering their services to team captain Mark Rummukainen. “If we can bring the entertainment value to the game and engage the community, then I think this will be a team that will be around for a long time,” Jamie tells the Canberra Times. Mark, who originally considered retirement, is thrilled with the rebirth. “The league said we could have had six imports if we couldn’t field a strong team, but with the proposal we put forward the league feels we’ll be competitive and we feel the same way.’’

Newcastle hockey stalwart Pete Lambert, a former AIHL commissioner, has always insisted that hockey in Australia is best served by the ‘community model’, in which sizeable regional population centres feel they have ownership of a team; local media take a crucial interest; and sponsors see a reason to associate with the team and derive a benefit from its local links. Fans are highly engaged because the players and administrators are in their community. This was borne out in the reaction to the Knights’ demise. It was front-page news on the Canberra Times. It was prime-time talkback fodder on Canberra breakfast radio. Neither would happen in Melbourne or Sydney if the entire league was swallowed by a croc during a cyclone watched by naked film stars. There are many other ‘minor’ sports as worthy of attention as local hockey. But in Canberra, the demise of a national sporting team is a big issue. Local media covered the story eagerly, and around the rest of Australia, social media filled in the gap and publicised the team’s plight, then its stirring renaissance, enabling fans to comment, support and contribute.

Modern communications technology offers unprecedented opportunities to smaller sports. Whatever else its faults, cyberspace has great reflexes, and more room than a newspaper. The passionate response, particularly on Facebook, convinced the organisers they would sell memberships, get volunteers and bums-on-seats, and establish a more professionally structured, membership-based club. Ideas about junior development, sponsorship, team name and logo, and organisation of all the above, occurred online.

The best things about modern media just saved a team for its passionate fans and its league. I get to go to Canberra to see why it so loves its hockey. This book keeps its centrepiece. Thank you, nerds and geeks, thank you. God bless the internet.