As Presque Isle’s first junior hockey team prepared to play its first-ever game on Friday, chaos unfolded around it.
The Presque Isle Frontiers were scheduled for an early afternoon puck drop against the South Shore Kings in the Hitmen Classic tournament in Wayne, New Jersey — the opening game in their inaugural season in the National Collegiate Development Conference (NCDC). The problem? Most of the team — and its head coach — were not there.
Many of the team’s initially tendered players and head coach Erik Caladi were stuck in Europe facing visa issues, team officials said. Even more of the roster was poached by other teams or left the Frontiers in the days leading up the game over issues with travel and confusion over housing fees.
The team’s owner, Chris Reaves of BladeEdge Ventures, flew to New Jersey from North Carolina on Friday in an attempt to sort things out. But 10 minutes before the game was slated to start, nine of the 13 players the team had on hand were not registered with the league.
“I was actually in the locker room trying to help them get everything done, but we just ran out of time,” Reaves said Monday.
On Friday, Frontiers’ players took the ice for warmups against the Kings, but because of the roster issues, league officials quickly called the game off. Presque Isle’s inaugural campaign began with a 1-0 forfeit loss.
The game’s scoresheet displays the team’s roster with four named players. The rest are labeled “Home Unknown Player 1” through “Home Unknown Player 9”.
The next day, the Frontiers took the ice with a 20-player roster, mainly made up of players from the Connecticut Jr. Rangers of the USPHL Premier, a Tier III American junior league under the same umbrella as the NCDC, a Tier II league run also by the USPHL.
“That was done to ensure that we could field the team, given the challenges that we had,” Tyler Brown, the Presque Isle team’s general manager of operations and billet coordinator said. “[It] also provides the opportunity to prospective players to move up from the USPHL Premier to NCDC level.”
The Rangers’ red and blue helmets and red pant shells clashed with Presque Isle’s yellow and green color scheme as the team saw game action for the first time against the Boston Dogs.
The Dogs joined the NCDC from the Eastern Hockey League in the middle of last season and finished dead last in the New England Division with a 10-19-2 record with an abridged schedule.
They beat Presque Isle 10-1 on Saturday. Forward Braden Ondrus, who joined the Frontiers from the Connecticut Jr. Rangers, scored the team’s lone goal. Ondrus added an assist and Presque Isle scored five goals in its final game of the tournament against the Boston Jr. Rangers Sunday, but the Frontiers were already in a 6-0 hole by the time they first got on the board. They ultimately lost 13-5.
The team’s next scheduled games are on the road on Sept. 19 and 20 against the Lewiston MAINEiacs, also new to the NCDC this year.