At the gate, these are the real little leagues.

• Author: Roush, Chris
• Position: Sports Section

Cindy Jones and other members of the Greensboro Generals Booster Club will gather Oct. 22 for a cookout to celebrate the East Coast Hockey League's opening night. Jones, club president, will invite former players of the Generals and the Greensboro Monarchs, a 1990s predecessor. They'll reminisce about great seasons such as 1990, when the Monarchs won the Jack Riley Cup, given to the ECHL champion.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Jones, a longtime season-ticket holder who has attended Greensboro hockey games for 40 years, notes that the booster club has even added about a dozen new members during the off-season. There's just one problem: After the cookout, Jones and her fellow booster-club members won't have a game to go to.

It's not that the Generals open on the road. The franchise folded in July after the city, which operated the team during the 2003-04 season, was unable to find a new owner. "It's going to be a long winter," Jones says.

Increasingly, second-tier sports franchises--other than minor-league baseball--are struggling in North Carolina. Unlike baseball, where new parks and nostalgia bring in fans, nearly a dozen minor-league hockey and football teams have failed for one reason or another since the original Generals and the Charlotte Checkers, another minor-league hockey team, folded in 1977.

Matt Brown, managing director of the Greensboro Coliseum, which lost the Generals this year and the Greensboro Prowlers, an arena-football team, in 2003, says teams suffer from uneven ticket sales. "You might have 10,000 people one game and 1,000 people the next."

It matters. Jeff Longo, president of the Charlotte Checkers ECHL team, which returned to the Queen City in 1993, estimates that as much as 90% of a minor-league hockey team's revenue comes from ticket sales.

The Prowlers were a classic example of up-and-down fan interest. The team drew 12,750 fans for an April 2000 game and 1,746 for one two years later. And it wasn't about wins and losses. In its last season, when the team went 9-7, average attendance was 3,812, more than 700 below the league average. The problem isn't unique to Greensboro. The Charlotte Rage, another arena-football team, averaged 13,248 in 1992. That dropped to 7,400 in 1993. The average was only 6,851 in 1996. The next year the team was gone.

The Carolina Cobras, an arena team that played in Raleigh from 2000 to 2002, saw average attendance drop from 13,233 in its first season to 9,257 in 2002. The Cobras lost $5...