Back in 1999, a friend and I were in the River View Plaza offices of the T-Devils' predecessor the Trenton Titans as season ticket holders # 144. We were able to pick out our seats from a huge seating diagram of the still-under-construction Sovereign Bank Arena. I still remember the seat numbers; Section 114, Row GG, seats 1-4. 7 rows off the ice in the end the home team attacked twice. Great seats. Opening night 1999 found 8,000 screaming fans watching the home boys beating the Johnstown Chiefs; the building ROCKED. The first season was great fun; a bunch of scrappy kids with a young coach taking an expansion team to within two wins of the Kelly Cup finals. Every night was packed, every night the crowd cheered and booed lustily, and it seemed like it would be like that every game.
The first 5 years of the team's existence were good times. Good teams, good coaches, some future NHL'ers on the roster (Fedoruk, Fedotenko, Smithson, Valliquette), two appearances in the finals and one championship. Passionate fans like Puckhead, the gang in Section 113, and the Trenton Signman made every night entertaining even if sometimes the on-ice product wasn't! My wife and I looked forward to the 36 nights each season we got to go to SBA. We met lots of great people there; seatmates, seat neighbors in our section, ushers, arena staff and executives, NHL scouts and front office personnel in town to see what their kids were doing "down on the farm". When the Titans were on the road, the voice of their first radio play by play Joe Zydlo called the games on 1680 AM (Wham Bam Boom! The Titans score!) Like I said: good times.
After the 2004-2005 season of magic that ended with a parade down Broad Street with the Kelly Cup, things started changing. You heard the whispers regarding the team's financial problems, and that the local owners were interested in sellling the team when it was at its highest value. When the New Jersey Devils completed their purchase of the team in 2006, at first it was seen by the fan base as a positive move. At last, the team would have an ownership group that had the wherewithal to properly market and advertise the team. Truth be told - by 2006-7, the attendance had slipped into the high 4000's and nobody in management seemed to be advertising the team with any degree of aggressiveness. We all thought the deep pockets of an NHL owner would stop the slow downward attendance trend.
Instead of improving, things got worse. The Devils decided after one year of ownership to rebrand the organization to the Trenton Devils with logos and colors consistent with the parent club. Bad move for a hockey team located in Flyers territory. The attendance nosedived and couldn't be corrected with marketing the team in the Monmouth, Ocean and Somerset county areas. It was as if your little town was invaded and occupied by a polite but alien power and they wanted to teach your children a foreign culture and language. Little kids from Hamilton and Bucks county were asking their parents for Martin Brodeur bobblehead dolls for sale at the gift shop, and NJ Devils jerseys started to be seen walking the concourse during intermissions. The season ticketholder base dropped from over five thousand in 1999 to less than a thousand last year. It was pathetic the few times I went down there in the 09-10 season. One night in February that season, I counted about 1100 people in the arena; the building was quiet and had zero life or energy.
Sorry to say, last season we didn't attend one game. Every time we thought about going down there and catching a game it was too easy to do something else. We no longer felt that we HAD to attend and support the team; we had no emotional attachment to the T-Devils as we had to the Titans.
And now, there will be no more games. The Devils own the ECHL franchise that the T-Devils played under. They will probably move the AA team to another city and become the Podunk Devils or the Smalltown Devils and continue play in the league. Hockey in Trenton, though, appears to be finished after 12 years in the league. So sad.
