The word “homespun” came to mind. As did the phrase “eager to please”.

I was in search of an Official Program for the minor-league hockey game between the Ontario Reign and the Utah Grizzlies. I hadn’t seen any being hawked when I entered the arena, so I asked the usher stationed at the portal to my section where I might go to find one. He seemed genuinely concerned, and suggested I try the Main Entrance. Which I did…to no avail.

A customer service representative working there was also intent upon helping me, but he didn’t have an answer either. “Let’s try the souvenir stand,” he said, and off we went.

The search wound up involving about a half-dozen well-intentioned employees of Citizens Business Bank Arena, and eventually brought me all the way around the concourse – so I got a program AND a free guided tour. Very nice.

Not so nice was the ticketing policy. The girl at the Box Office window, like the rest of her colleagues, had been anxious to be of service. She displayed the seating chart and asked what I had in mind. It was kind of like buying a car. “Can you show me something in an upper tier center ice seat? With a cup holder, maybe?”

She tapped away at her keyboard for a moment, and then turned to me beaming. “I can put you in Section 204, Row C,” she proudly announced. It was an $18 ticket. For which I paid $21. Not by mistake – no, there was clearly a $3 fee added to the transaction. Something that I later noticed on my receipt as “L.E.T$”.

Seriously? I mean, I understand the fees associated with purchasing tickets by phone or on-line (although the amounts charged are waaaaaaay out of line with what it costs to provide those services). But a 17% surcharge for walking up to the ticket window? What’s next – a maintenance fee for periodic servicing of the doorway that I’ll be walking through?

Don’t get me wrong:  I have no problem with paying $21 for a good seat at an entertaining hockey game. Just don’t insult my intelligence in the process.

But back to the “homespun” part I was telling you about. If the atmosphere at an Ontario Reign hockey game were a person, it would be the love child of a high school fund-raiser and a professional sporting event. A 50/50 raffle was aggressively promoted. As was a post-game Chuck-a-Puck contest, in which a puck obtained via a donation could bring its owner a prize if it wound up coming to rest the closest to an on-ice target.

If this were a day game, I’m pretty sure I could’ve had my car washed in the parking lot by a throng of earnest teens, while snacking on home-baked cookies shaped like hockey sticks.

All in all, it was charming.

This community embrace of a local team is the hallmark of minor-league sports, and the lower the level of the league, the tighter the embrace. The Cape Cod Baseball League comes to mind as a premiere example. This amateur circuit in Massachusetts is populated by highly regarded college baseball players who actually stay with local families all summer – and even work part-time jobs as part of the package.

In my new all-time favorite sports oxymoron, the Ontario Reign plays in the Pacific Division of the East Coast Hockey League. To be fair, the league maintains that it is simply “The ECHL”, but we minor-league hockey fans are onto them.

The ECHL (wink, wink) is a Double-A league, the bottom of the food chain for NHL feeder systems. Players signed to an entry-level NHL contract start here and work their way up through the AHL and eventually to the big-time. Hopefully.

Having just been to an NHL game, I looked forward to the “compare and contrast” opportunity that presented itself. I intended to find out exactly how much better the elite players of the game are vis a vis the wannabes.

The answer is…well, it’s hard to say. It’s difficult to separate the actual quality of play from the overall game environment. For example, after watching for a while, I was certain that the ECHL players were smaller than the NHL players. But upon consulting my program I realized that this was not the case. I had mentally conferred “bigger” status on NHL players because everything else was bigger – the arena, the crowd, the scoreboard…the price of a beer.

I finally concluded that the primary difference was crispness. Everything done by NHL players is performed with an efficiency of motion that is still a work in process in the minors. Passes are put right on the center of the stick blade, and lead their recipient perfectly, for example. What takes three motions in the ECHL takes just one in the NHL.

Other than that…snappier uniforms, maybe?

Both the Ontario Reign and the Citizens Business Bank Arena are relatively new. The team relocated from Texas in time to open the Arena and begin the 2008-2009 season. It couldn’t have helped the team’s fortunes that their arrival coincided with the real-estate meltdown that hit the “Inland Empire” area of California particularly hard. But since both team and arena are owned by entertainment colossus AEG – who also owns the parent NHL club, the L.A. Kings – suffice to say, nobody’s paycheck was in jeopardy.

The Reign drew more than 5,800 fans a game that first season (second-most in the league), and rewarded the newly faithful with a Pacific Division championship. The next season brought out an average of 6,451 fans – an ECHL attendance record.

This season? Well it’s still a bit early, but a quick check of the standings reveals that the Reign have a little work to do to make the playoffs. OK, a lot of work. The ECHL has 19 teams. If you remove conference and division distinctions and simply rank-order the league by record, the Reign find themselves staring up at…well, at every single one of the other 18 teams. By a lot. But if they were to go on a four or five game winning streak? Forget it – they’d still be in last place.

Their opponent for the evening was the Utah Grizzlies, who occupied the exact opposite end of the standings. This wasn’t destined to be pretty.

To be concluded in next post…