The NHL’s Dallas Stars have held their training camps in some pretty exotic locales over the years, including Vail, Colo., and Prince Edward Island. More recently the week-long sessions have been at the team’s practice facility in Frisco. Some of the team’s coaches didn’t like that location, though, because the players who live in North Texas couldn’t separate themselves sufficiently from family concerns to focus on preparing for the season.
So now, Stars President and CEO Jim Lites wants to take the annual, week-long scrimmage/on-ice sessions to Fort Worth’s convention center, which he says has the only ice rink in Tarrant County that’s able to accommodate the activity.
Lites and his people have been talking about the potential move with the Fort Worth mayor’s office, the Stars exec said in Dallas today during a panel discussion with other sports executives presented by the North Texas Commission. It makes sense to hold the training camp on the western side of Dallas-Fort Worth, Lites said, because it would keep the session within the team’s market area and help build up the Stars’ fan base in Cowtown. But, will it be far enough away there to satisfy the coaches who were unhappy with Frisco? “Yeah,” Lites said with a laugh after the panel discussion. “Just so the guys can’t run home to their wives and be bugged by the honey-do’s.”
