Our view

Casper is a good sports city, notwithstanding a minor league basketball organization's failure to get off the ground.

What do you think?

We welcome viewpoints from readers on this and other issues.

Sports fans are eternal optimists. Whether their team finishes in the cellar or loses the championship game, it's wait until next year and a fresh start on the road to glory.

But what if the team never even played a game?

The sad saga of the All-American Professional Basketball League, which would have had a Casper team on the court today if the ambitious operation had not gone belly up in August, left some players, coaches and potential fans embittered. Not only in Casper, but also in the nine other cities that obtained charter franchises.

If history is any indication, the AAPBL won't be the last minor league sports franchise to come to Casper. So there is much to learn from the frustrating experience of the AAPBL, which was chronicled Sunday in "Cleaning up a minor league mess," by Star-Tribune sports reporter Peter Hockaday.

Casper had a special connection to the start-up league because its founder, Worth Christie, lives here. Christie's costly failed experiment, frankly, will make anyone think twice about a similar venture.

Yet Christie was right about at least one thing: Casper is a good sports town. Both the Casper Rockies and Wyoming Cavalry have garnered loyal fans in recent years, and in its heyday in the 1980s the Continental Basketball Association's Wyoming Wildcatters had similar success.

There is still room for sports entrepreneurs to make money here, with the right mix of investors and talent. If you can field a competitive team, people will buy tickets.

The AAPBL failed because its survival depended on immediate revenue from selling franchises and season tickets, which it simply couldn't expect to generate as a new league. Without an investor willing to absorb big losses on the front end for the shot at a considerable return down the road, the blueprint was doomed from the start.

Any franchise hoping to make a go of it in Casper needs to realize that it has to do more than schedule games and select a team logo before expecting anyone to buy season tickets. We may be starved for entertainment, but we like to see what we're buying before we show up on a regular basis.

Christie describes himself as the biggest victim of the league's failure, because he lost the most money, and because his reputation took a major hit when he could not deliver the goods. His viewpoint is understandable. But in a venture that saw many people lose time and money - especially players who paid to attend the league's basketball camp in Billings - no one is likely to be very sympathetic.

Plans can fail in any business, and sports is no exception. What Casper needs to take away from this experience is that any start-up team is a risk unless it is associated with a league that has a proven record. Rather than waiting for a dubious franchise to land in its lap, the city would best be served by an effort to show an established league that Casper is a good place to bring a team.

It's a case that can easily be made.