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Why sports fans care so much about their teams — even when they move away

Players raise their sticks to salute the fans after the Arizona Coyotes’ final game at Mullett Arena in Tempe on April 17, 2024.
Nick Sanchez/KJZZ
Players raise their sticks to salute the fans after the Arizona Coyotes’ final game at Mullett Arena in Tempe on April 17, 2024.

The National Hockey League is more than halfway through its current season. That means the Utah Hockey Club, the team formerly known as the Arizona Coyotes, has played more than half a season in its new state.

The Coyotes called the Valley home for 27 seasons, but the threat of re-location was there during many of them, especially recently -—from questions of ownership to debate over a suitable arena where they would actually play their games.

I personally never really got into the Coyotes; I rooted for them to do well, but didn’t follow the team that closely. And, I’m a pretty big sports fan — while baseball’s my favorite, either in person or on TV, I enjoy watching just about any sport.

While it may have seemed a bit odd, especially when the team first moved here from Winnipeg, Canada, to play ice hockey in the desert, the Coyotes did have a dedicated following. And for a lot of those fans, the experience since the team left for Salt Lake City has been — tough. At their last game, a win over the Edmonton Oilers in Tempe last April, The Show's Nick Sanchez caught up with a few of them.

"For the past week, every day I’ve gone through the five stages of grief on a daily basis, you run through bargaining, denial and acceptance and anger, and so, yeah, this is very bittersweet," an Arizona Coyotes fan said. "Honestly, this is the longest-standing relationship I’ve had, you know, they’ve been here more than half my life. Yeah, it’s hard. It’s hard."

"Whoever’s playing in the desert, I want to be here and I want to support them. We’re already talking about flying to Salt Lake if we can with our Coyotes jerseys to support them there," another Arizona Coyotes fan said. "We want to keep supporting them wherever they are and we want to welcome a new team, if that’s what’s gonna happen, if the Roadrunners are going to stay here, we want to support them no matter what. We want to show that hockey belongs here."

Typically, at the end of a game, fans start filing out of the stadium or arena. Sometimes, if the home team’s not playing well, they get a head start. But as the last horn sounded to end that last Coyotes game, nobody left for at least half an hour. Also, nobody was sitting down. The fans who’d packed Mullett Arena stood, clapping — a last salute to their team and their players. Or maybe an attempt to prolong the team’s existence in the Valley. Or maybe they just didn’t know what to do next.

The players, too, stuck around. They shook hands, hugged each other and skated around the ice waving to fans — long after they’d have normally retreated to the locker room. At one point, they started throwing hockey sticks, pucks, hats and other souvenirs into the stands. It was like they didn’t want the moment to end. Or maybe they just didn’t know what to do next, either.

Center Nick Schmaltz (front left) throws a hat into the crowd after the Arizona Coyotes’ final game at Mullett Arena in Tempe on April 17, 2024.
Nick Sanchez/KJZZ
Center Nick Schmaltz (front left) throws a hat into the crowd after the Arizona Coyotes’ final game at Mullett Arena in Tempe on April 17, 2024.

I wasn’t at that game — but I saw it. It’d been a while since I’d watched a hockey game. But on that April evening last year, I found myself on the couch with the TV on. And as I watched the players milling around on the ice and the fans standing, clapping, cheering, holding up signs, I was taken back to a similar April evening in 1997.

I grew up just outside Hartford, Connecticut. I was away at college on the night of the last-ever Hartford Whalers game, a win over the Tampa Bay Lightning. After that final horn sounded, the players stayed on the ice. The fans stayed in the stands. The team tossed pucks, sticks and gloves into the crowd. The team captain, Kevin Dineen, spoke.

"On behalf of all the players that’ve left Hartford and the guys that are sitting on this bench, we just want to say thank you from all of us. God bless and thank you very much," said Dineen.

Everyone knew it was ending, but maybe, not just yet.

I’d been going to games at the Hartford Civic Center for years. I knew all the players. I had the T-shirts and hats. Posters on my childhood bedroom wall. Read the box scores. The whole bit. And then, it was gone. Over. We all knew that season would be the Whalers’ last in Hartford, that they’d be moving to North Carolina to become the Hurricanes. But we knew that in our heads. In our hearts, there was still a chance, right?

As it turns out, no. There was no chance. The team moved. It even won a Stanley Cup, in 2006. But I wasn’t cheering for them. On the contrary — I was actively rooting against the Hurricanes. Even as I hoped they’d fail in their post-Hartford existence, however, I wondered: Why did I care so much?

"We have undervalued the importance of fandom in the lives of fans. It’s not just a casual pastime for these individuals. It matters to them in deep and profound ways," said Daniel Wann, a psychology professor at Murray State University

Wann has studied the psychology of sports fans for more than three decades. And he says it makes perfect sense for fans of particular teams to feel — whatever they feel — if their team leaves town.

"The individuals, when their favorite team, if it’s a team that they love and have loved for a long time, when that team leaves, it’s a loss. I can’t say that it can be equated with the loss of a loved one or a family member, but the process is quite similar," said Wann. "There’s this void, something missing in their lives that was so central to who they are and such a big part of how they structured their lives and things that they did, that if that thing is gone, we would be grossly misunderstanding the human psyche if we thought that fans could just shrug their shoulders and move on."

I, for one, was not able to just shrug my shoulders and move on. I was angry. Angry about the fact that the team had left and angry about the way it went down. I was sad — this was the only hometown pro sports team in Connecticut at the time — a real point of pride. I was a little lost, sports-wise. But my reaction was not universal. I had friends who did move on and rooted for other teams. My good friend and next-door neighbor growing up actually eventually became a Hurricanes fan.

Wann says that’s not unexpected. When a fan’s team leaves town, he says, there are a lot of potential responses; some fans will swear off the team, while others will follow them. Some fans will root for the players that wore their team’s jersey, but not root for their new team. Others will give up on the sport altogether. It happened when the Whalers left Hartford, it happened when the Coyotes left the Valley — it’s happening as the [Atheletics] leave Oakland and will happen when the next team leaves its home city.

Wann says there’s a range of reactions fans take when their favorite team is uprooted.

Full conversation

WANN: To sort of come back to the analogy of when you've lost a loved one, everybody grieves a loss differently, right? There's no cookie-cutter way that we are gonna grieve for a lost loved one. The same is true when we've lost an important part of our lives, whether it's a, a favorite sport team has left, or maybe a favorite amusement park is shut down, or maybe we've been relocated and now we're no longer at the place of employment that we love forever. When we have these losses in our lives, something has to give, and people have to cope in a certain way, and they cope differently.

Everybody is different and I think that that's one of the critical things that I like to tell people that are experiencing this type of a loss is that It's OK to feel those ways, right? I mean, sometimes fans like, “it's just a team. Why do I care so much? Why am I so sad?” You're sad because it mattered to you, and, and it's OK to have those feelings.

BRODIE: That's an interesting point you make, because I think for a lot of people, and I, I fell into this category. Anyone who knows me knows that I was and continue to be a fan of the Hartford Whalers, a hockey team that, leftCentral Connecticut while I was in college. And when they left, I remember feeling a deep sense of loss, but at the same time, I remember feeling, “this is silly, it's a sports team,” and having people who weren't fans of sport at all, saying, “what do you care? It's just a team, like nobody died, like you didn't lose a friend, you didn't lose a job, you didn't get kicked out of school, you lost a sports team.” And it seems as though there's sort of this, I don't want to say it's shame, but this sort of internal feeling of, why do I care so much? It's a sports team, but as you're saying, it is a loss.

WANN: Yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned that because one of the things that we have found in the research is that, when you talk to sports fans and you ask them, “so how does being a fan of this team or this sport provide meaning and purpose in your life?” They sort of first say, “well, I don't know really that it does.” And then you like, go into it further, and they just have this light bulb go off and they realize,” oh my gosh, you know, I, it, it does. I wake up in the morning and it, and it matters to me, and I'm excited because I could talk to my friends about last night's game,” or, “it gives me, you know, this idea of how I want to structure my vacation.”

It gives us the sense of meaning and purpose. So then if fans undervalue what sport matters to how sport matters to them, it's not that surprising when that thing is taken away, that they're surprised at just how, what the sense of loss is, right? But from an academic perspective, it makes very good sense.

And so when people look at somebody and say, “well, it's just a sports team, you know why? Just follow them now that they're in Utah.” For the fan, it is so much not that simple.

BRODIE: I'm curious what it says to you about fans who try to root for another team. So, when again, going back to my example, when the Whalers left, I tried to become a fan of the New York Rangers. I'm a fan of a number of other New York sports teams and I thought, “OK, I'll give this a shot,” because I certainly even though I love the players I couldn't root for the team that they became in Carolina. I tried to root for the Rangers, and it lasted like 10 minutes. I just couldn't get invested in it. So, I wonder what that says to you, psychologically, about people because I'm sure there are people in in Arizona who've thought, “OK, I'll root for the Utah Hockey Club,” and just can't?

WANN: Yeah, I refer to that as the rebound team, that everybody's like, “OK, so I've lost this love, and so now I'm on the rebound, and I've got to go search for the next best option.” And that option rarely, not never, but rarely matches up, right? It never reaches what we had before, because think about it.

If you, if you're a fan of Team A, and you have been for, for months, years, decades, generationally even, and all of a sudden you're like, “well, they're gone, so I'll go find something else. Golly, how many things about Team B are now not the same,” right? So many parts of following Team A just aren't there.

BRODIE: Does it seem to matter, have you found that it matters at all, the way in which a team leaves? For example, like the Baltimore Colts, the football team left, basically they packed up a U-Haul van and left in the middle of the night. Nobody knew it was coming.

I'm thinking about the Oakland A's, a more recent example where They are allegedly going to Las Vegas, but they're gonna play a couple of years in in Northern California first, which is seeming like a maybe a more messy relocation than, for example, the coyotes who just went to Salt Lake City. Like, does it matter the manner in which the leaving happens?

WANN: Yeah, such a great question. I always think about it again back in terms of romantic relationships, and people always talk about, wow, it was, it was a good, a good breakup. The best breakup is still an ugly breakup. So, yes, you know, the Colts leaving in the middle of the night. I mean, you said nobody knew. Somebody knew, the bus drivers knew, right? But they did a great job of keeping it from the fans. They kept it from the people who would really want to know. And then there's the Oakland A's who, I mean, they have known for years that things are in trouble. And so it's always like, do you want the instant death or do you want the slow death? Neither one of them sounds very good when you get right down to it. Yes, they do change the fan’s reaction.

Mark Brodie’s collection of Hartford Whalers hats and T-shirts. The Whalers left Connecticut in 1997 and moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, where they became the Carolina Hurricanes. The Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup in 2006.
Mark Brodie/KJZZ
Mark Brodie’s collection of Hartford Whalers hats and T-shirts. The Whalers left Connecticut in 1997 and moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, where they became the Carolina Hurricanes. The Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup in 2006.

Wann says just like there are a variety of fan responses when their team leaves town, there isn’t consensus about how those fans will feel down the road, either. Loss is a funny thing, he says, and the passage of time heals — whether it’s the end of a romantic relationship or the end of a relationship with your favorite team.

And like the advice you might get when a personal relationship ends, Wann suggests trying to remember the good times, not the bad ones — and keep in mind that something else will, eventually, come along — whether it’s a new team or a new interest.

More than 20 years after the team left Hartford, I still wear my Whalers shirts and hats. Like, a lot. And while I’ve bought most of them since the team has ceased to exist, both vintage and new merch are big sellers, they still make me think of my childhood and the pride of rooting for a small-market, perpetual underdog. There’s still a tiny piece of me that dreams of an NHL team skating in Hartford again, even though it’s been close to 30 years since I actually lived there. But I know how unlikely that is. Probably as unlikely as the Yankees relocating from the Bronx to the Constitution State. And I’m OK with that. When I think about it, I try to remember the good times with my family and friends attending games at the Civic Center, cheering on our hometown team and roaring when the delightfully cheesy song “Brass Bonanza” would play after a goal, rather than the sadness we felt when we knew it would all be over.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

Mark Brodie is a co-host of The Show, KJZZ’s locally produced news magazine. Since starting at KJZZ in 2002, Brodie has been a host, reporter and producer, including several years covering the Arizona Legislature, based at the Capitol.
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