Manchester Storm (1995-2002)
| Manchester Storm | |
|---|---|
| Greatest successes | |
|
|
| Club information | |
| history |
Manchester Storm 1995-2003 |
| Location | Manchester , England |
| Club colors | white, purple, blue |
| Venue | Manchester Evening News Arena |
| capacity | 18,500 seats |
The Manchester Storm were an ice hockey club in the city of Manchester in England . They played in the British Hockey League - Division 1 and from 1996 in the then highest British league, the Ice Hockey Superleague . The games were played at the Manchester Evening News Arena , which has a capacity of 18,500 for ice hockey games.
In 2015 a new club called Manchester Storm was founded, which plays in the Elite Ice Hockey League , currently the highest British ice hockey league .
history
The team was founded in 1995 and started playing in Division One of the British Hockey League . In their very first season, the Storm won the British Hockey League with 99 points, the second highest British league at the time. The team scored 539 goals in 52 games, with 1,364 penalty minutes the team was also leading in this statistic. The team qualified in the subsequent playoff games for the newly founded Ice Hockey Superleague .
The first season in England's top division was unsatisfactory from a sporting point of view, with the Manchester team only winning 14 out of 43 games. In the following season, the team managed to achieve a positive game record for the first time. In the 1998/99 season, the team scored 65 points in the regular season and won the British ice hockey championship for the first time. In the following year the Storm belonged to the top group, a year later the team collapsed and reached eighth place. Between 1996 and 2000 the club took part in all four European Hockey League events.
The attendance was very good by British standards - the club was for years the Ice Hockey Superleague and one of the most popular in Europe, with a crowd of up to 8,800. The first game in the Manchester Evening News Arena on September 15, 1995 attracted over 10,000 spectators. The climax was reached on February 23, 1997, when it managed to sell out the arena in the derby against the Sheffield Steelers with 17,245 spectators. To date, this is a record for an ice hockey game between British teams and was also a European record at times.
The 2001/02 season ended in last place. The Storm then played three more games before the team had to be disbanded due to financial problems. The reasons for this were the high financing costs for a professional ice hockey top team and the recent decline in attendance (the last game against the London Knights only came to 2510 spectators), with which the rent for the huge arena could no longer be financed.
A year later, on the initiative of the Friends of Manchester Ice Hockey, a new professional ice hockey team was founded in Manchester with the Manchester Phoenix . This played in the Elite Ice Hockey League until 2009 , then retired to the second highest division, the English Premier Ice Hockey League , and stopped playing at the beginning of 2017.
Start-up
In 2015 the name Manchester Storm was revived - since then there has been a team with this name in the Elite Ice Hockey League , which uses the same colors and a similar logo and replaces the Hull Stingrays , which had previously withdrawn from the EIHL and disbanded due to financial problems.
Well-known former players
Individual evidence
- ↑ Statistics for the British Hockey League on hockeydb.com
- ^ Geering: Hockeyarenas.net. Retrieved January 19, 2018 .
- ↑ a b c End of an era? | Manchester Evening News - menmedia.co.uk . In: archive.is . September 19, 2012 ( archive.is [accessed January 19, 2018]).