Bring Hockey Back to Richmond

Is there a city of that size with worse sporting venues, RIR notwithstanding, than Richmond?

 

It's a complete suck fest if you take away Shaka Smart.

For it's size, nothing sucks more than the Tidewater/Va Beach area.

 

ODU's arena is better than VCU's (even though VCU has better and louder support) and Harbor Park kills The Diamond every day and twice on Sunday. Debating The Scope vs. Richmond Coliseum is like trying to decide what color diarrhea you want.

Virginia screams for a decent 18,000-seat arena. Maybe Va. Beach will finally move forward on one (Starman alert: the plan they're pursuing has no city subsidy for the arena itself, though it would provide support structures like roads and parking garages and the like).

 

I think it has to do with Virginia having independent cities. The more well-to-do folks in Henrico and Chesterfield aren't flipping the bill for a ballpark in the city limits. If Richmond were part of a county, the city proper would be bigger, and the government could fleece the county residents while they could feel like they were getting a small ROI. Asheville is the only city I can think of that has similar sub-standard arenas in this region. Hampton Roads at least has Harbor Park.

 

Let me know when the Rhinos drop the puck. Think I've still got Pepsi cans touting season tickets.

 

I'm more speaking to the games played in the parks. There is only AA baseball, or is it AAA down there, and no decent college sports, and it is a huge TV market compared to Richmond.

 

I was talking about the quality of the arena and ballpark, not the teams. You mentioned D-League and the Wizards do want to find an affiliate within a short drive and probably wouldn't care too much about the condition of the Coliseum. Or perhaps a D-League team could play at UR or VCU.

 

Private developers recently unveiled a plan to build a new stadium at The Diamond site (on the Boulevard), with no public investment except for needed infrastructure changes, but the mayor tried to push the stadium downtown. I would expect this plan could resurface.

The Boulevard is a far more convenient location than downtown in the slip, and has long been the site of Richmond pro baseball, dating back to old Parker Field and the Richmond Virginians (Vees), a former Yankees' affiliate in the International League. No reason the city should not embrace this plan, except that Richmond city government has been dominated by fools for decades.

The Richmond Robins were pretty popular in the AHL in the 1970s, as a Flyers affiliate, when the NHL had only 16 teams. I remember watching Orest Kindrichuck, Larry Goodenough and others play there.

Richmond has some excellent athletic venues. The Seigel Center at VCU and the renovated Robins Center at UR are both outstanding and Robins Stadium at UR is as nice as any FCS venue for a school that size (3K undergrads). But the city-owned Coliseum is a dump, in a terrible part of town, and sisnce UR football went back to campus City Stadium is probably an abandoned, deteriorating facility, since UR handled all the upkeep.

 

They absolutely should build a new stadium on the Boulevard. That area makes too much sense.

Regarding athletic venues, you're spot on about all of them. I'll add in that City Stadium is a decrepit relic - hence the building of Robins Stadium, which is, like everything at UR, over-the-top nice. And Sports Backers Stadium is small, but very nice.

 

I forgot about Sports Backers, that's a great little stadium for its purpose. I wasn't really counting the college arenas. They are great for mid-major hoops, but don't do anything to attract any kind of pro franchises or get the major concert tours to stop skipping Richmond for Charlottesville.

 

Sports Backer's Stadium? The only thing it's missing is an adjacent high school.

 

I'd be more enthused about building on the Diamond/Parker Field site if they could ever do anything about its surroundings. Industrial businesses and the Greyhound station do not do a lot for compelling would-be fans to come on over, or existing fans to hang around a spell. There's been some development on the other side of the tracks, but I can't imagine a lot of people walking to the park from the Buzz and Ned's.

Harbor Park has the water and keeps the coal trains where they can be part of the distant background, and the parks in Durham, Charlotte and Greensboro integrate nicely with the downtown. Shockoe could have been a good solution, but at this point they might as well just concede the point that there's always going to be political opposition to building there and give it up.