Remember When Wichita Falls Had a Minor League Basketball Team? [VIDEO]
Wichita Falls had all of the big four sports here and the one I just learned about is the basketball team.
Wichita Falls as of right now does not have a sports team and that's really sad. Back in the day, they had the Spudders for baseball. Not too long ago, we had the Wildcats for hockey and the Nighthawks for football. The one I did not know about, is the Wichita Falls Texans. Who played in the Continental Basketball Association. It no longer goes by that, it is now basically the same thing as the D-League for the NBA.
The team lasted in our city from 1988-1994. They would play at Midwestern State University in D.L. Ligon Coliseum. They had an amazing 1991 season securing the CBA Championship that year. Sadly, they would leave us in 1994 and become the Chicago Rockers.
It's so sad that Wichita Falls wouldn't even support a winning team. The year they won their championship, Wichita Falls had the lowest attendance in the entire CBA. Averaging just over 1,600 fans a game. The owner lost hundreds of thousands of dollars having the team here. He said in an article in 1993, the team needed 3,000 fans just to break even. He would also say 4,000 fans per game is something he would have made money on.
Lanham Lyne the owner of the Texans didn't mind losing a couple thousand every season, it was the $300,000 loss during one of the seasons that probably put the ax in the Wichita Falls Texans. He was trying to find someone to split the costs with him during that final season so the financial burden was not just on him. The Texans probably lasted in our city longer because of Lyne willing to take those losses, but unfortunately couldn't keep it in our city past 1994.
A city with less population than Wichita Falls, Rapid City, South Dakota was averaging just over 5,000 fans a game. The population is not always a factor, the largest city in CBA at the time was Columbus, Ohio and they had terrible attendance as well.
Like I said early, as of now, we have no teams in Wichita Falls. If you enjoy having sports in our city, you do have to support them. Am I saying you have to go to every game? No, but taking in a game maybe once a month? That's more like it. Hopefully, we can get something back in our city. It's tough to write stories of a championship team in our city and finding out we had the worst attendance in the entire league during it.
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