Spinoff thread: Minor League sports in Baton Rouge

No

I just don't see the support in Baton Rouge needed to support a minor league team. I've always though Baton Rouge was never really a sports town but more of an LSU town. Nothing wrong with that.

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Other cities can balance a major college and minor league sports.

Knoxville has a minor league baseball team, for example.

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That's great, but just look at the history of minor league teams in BR.

Knoxville doesn't average 10k fans at Vol baseball games either. the football argument only works 2 months of the baseball season, but LSU would dominate February-July

IMO, the devil is in the details.

Indoor/Arena football would be tough sell, like it is everywhere.

Baseball would need a stadium so location would be critical. It was kicked around year or two ago a field in Livingston Parish but not sure what happened. Obviously it's hot as hell in the summer so to be successful I would it it would have to be a decent quality team and no one would care until after mid-June.

Basketball in any time but summer would be competing against LSU in something.

Hockey, seems most doable but would need fan support. What happened with Kingfish?

Here are links to the two affiliated hockey leagues:
ECHL Kingfish were here

AHL
Older league with bigger cities. They have teams in Cedar Park and San Antonio. Aside from them, the closest teams are in Charlotte, Illinois, Iowa, and California.

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Hockey, seems most doable but would need fan support. What happened with Kingfish?

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Ice hockey just seems like a tough sell anywhere outside the Northeast and the Upper Midwest.

Taking the NHL for example, there have been some teams that have survived in big cities in the South and West where you're inevitably going to have just enough hockey fans to sustain a franchise. And of course everyone supports a winner. But it was just four years ago that the NHL team in Atlanta bailed and went to Winnipeg. It's always a shaky proposition.

I'll tell you what I think would work in the Baton Rouge area: a NASCAR track. It's not ice hockey and it's not a sport that you can see at LSU. Build a big track in Central or Denham Springs and get it on the Sprint Cup Series. Louisiana doesn't even have a track on the Busch series, much less Sprint Cup. If I were Kip and the Livingston President, I would work together on that.