A Tough Place to Play

If you’re in the mood to see some hard-hitting minor league hockey, Asheville, North Carolina is the place to go. Led by Captain Tom Wilson, the Asheville Smoke of the United Hockey League is one of the toughest teams in minor pro hockey.

The UHL is a league consisting of 10 teams located along the east coast and mid western United States. There are a good mix of savvy veterans and young hungry hockey players in this league. The Smoke have a little of both.

Rivalries are a bit hard to come by in this league due to the great length the teams have to travel to face each other. An exception are a few teams from Michigan with short bus trips and Asheville vs. Knoxville with only an hour and a half ride between them.

The Smoke play the Knoxville Speed a total of 19 times this year. This is up from the 14 times they went at it against one another last year. The tempers from this interstate rivalry finally boiled over during an infamous bench-clearing brawl on Super Bowl Sunday at the Asheville Civic Center.

Most of the Smoke players are wearing different sweaters with different teams in different leagues this year, but that doesn’t represent a lack of toughness. When former player/coach Sean Ulrich took over after Coach Pat Bingham took a position with the Wheeling Nailers of the ECHL, he went looking for tough physical guys to fill the void caused by the high turnover that is minor league hockey. In fact, this year’s edition of the Smoke, their fourth in Asheville, is even tougher than last year.

The before mentioned Tom Wilson leads his troops into war every night. Wilson, although tough, may not be the toughest. The Smoke brought in, among others, Chad Wagner from the WCHL’s San Diego Gulls. Wagner has had a history of run-ins with various tough guys and has more often than not come out on top. His role has always been to protect his teammates and keep the other teams honest. “That’s how I got my job, they said go out and fight if you want a job here and I said sure, that’s how it started, I had never fought before and I just started fighting and I liked it”, Wagner says.

Kris Schultz, an original member of the Asheville Smoke after relocation from Brantford, Ontario in 1998, spent two years in the Central Hockey League before coming back to Asheville. Since his early days, Schultz has become more of a complete hockey player. In 1998-99 under Coach Keith Gretzky, Schultz wasn’t on a regular line. Since then he has developed his skills and now has a pension for the net, scoring 13 goals last year playing with Wichita and Columbus of the CHL. “I was able to play with a couple of very offensive players in Wichita for a year and a half and I learned a lot from them in practice just kind of picking their brain and watched how they handled the puck”, says Schultz. His newfound offensive prowess and the willingness to drop the gloves with anyone give the Smoke a definite boost.

Asheville also has some scoring punch to go along with its toughness adding Jean- Francois DuFour, Todd MacIsaac, and Forrest Gore during the off-season. However, The Smoke’s biggest asset is still its toughness and the willingness of these players to go toe to toe with anyone in the league.

If they can control their tempers when necessary and get big years from some of their goal scorers, Asheville should retain their title as UHL Eastern Conference Champions.