Panther City comes in roaring

By David Mullen

A new professional team has found a home in Fort Worth but arrives in town unknown. The Panther City Lacrosse Club seems ready to stalk Fort Worth and the surrounding wilds of Tarrant County searching for hungry sports fans. 

“We understand that more people than not haven’t seen this,” said Panther City President and CEO Greg Bibb. “Initially, it is going to be ‘Come out and support your hometown team, show civic pride and support Fort Worth.’ And when we get the fans here, we are confident that the game will sell itself.”

The game is box lacrosse, and the league is the National Lacrosse League (NLL), the largest men’s professional box lacrosse league in the world. “There are very successful sports properties in the marketplace,” Bibb said. “Obviously, TCU has done a phenomenal job with their teams and athletic department, but when it comes to professional sports here, we’re it.”

 Dallas already has a heightened awareness of field lacrosse, where area high school and college teams have fielded squads for years. “That is actually where we started our grassroots marketing,” Bibb replied. “If you looked at our season ticket roster right now, we over-index in that part of the region. We have a lot of season ticket holders from University and Highland Park and Frisco, Plano, Southlake and the Mid-Cities corridor, even more than Fort Worth. But that is going to change.”

Bibb is accustomed to marketing a pro team not playing in Dallas. Bibb also serves as the president and CEO for the Dallas Wings of the WNBA, calling College Park Center on the UT Arlington campus home. Bibb feels he has the right roadmap for marketing box lacrosse locally. The team’s theme is: “We Are Fort Worth. We Are Panther City.”

Recognized as the oldest organized sport in North America, lacrosse dates to indigenous Canada in the 1630s. Unlike the field lacrosse played outdoors on a large field, box lacrosse is played inside the confines of an ice hockey rink, with glass and rink boards intact. The playing surface consists of a green turf carpet. 

Like field lacrosse, teams score by tossing a ball into a goal with a net pocket at the end of a long stick. There are an average of 25 combined goals during a typical NLL game. In more familiar terms, box lacrosse is to field lacrosse as arena football is to NFL football.

 Each game consists of four 15-minute quarters, and ties are broken in sudden-victory overtime. Each team has five runners (forwards, transition players and defensemen) and a goaltender on the floor during the game. Each team dresses 19 players (17 runners and two goaltenders) per game, and the players rotate on and off the floor in shifts or “on the fly” like in ice hockey.

Founded in 1986, the NLL was introduced as the Eagle Pro Box Lacrosse League and made up of just four teams between New Jersey and Maryland, which is traditionally an area where lacrosse is popular collegiately. No team has won an NCAA lacrosse title south of Chapel Hill, N.C. A field lacrosse team called the Dallas Rattlers of Major League Lacrosse played in Frisco and folded in 2020. 

With the scared face of an ex-player perfectly plucked out of central casting, GM and VP of lacrosse operations Bob Hamley oversees the Panther City roster. “About 80 to 85 percent of our league players and coaches are Canadian,” said Hamley, a former NLL player and coach from Owen Sound, Ontario. 

“Our league is full of firefighters, teachers, bankers, you name it. The league mantra used to be ‘weekend warriors.’ Now the league has become more of a full-time gig for many of the good players, playing in the pro field league and the indoor league as well.” Practice and games are once a week.

“The game is very physical,” Bibb said. “There is a real tie between our sport and hockey. Most of the players come from Ontario and a lot of the guys grew up playing high-level hockey. All of the outdoor rinks — called boxes — melt in the summer, so they came up with a game called box lacrosse.”    

After a 14-year NLL Hall of Fame career, Tracey Kelusky will be the head coach of Panther City, currently holding training camp in Ontario. Panther City opens at Philadelphia on Saturday, Dec. 4 and has its inaugural home opener on Friday, Dec. 10 against Vancouver at 7:30 p.m. 

The 14,000 seat Dickies Arena will be Panther City’s lair. Adjacent to the Will Rogers Memorial Center, Dickies Arena opened in 2019 and hosts concerts, sporting events and the Fort Worth Stock Show Rodeo. Inside, it looks like a modern version of Reunion Arena with excellent sightlines from two tiers and an intimate feel.

“It [box lacrosse] is a hybrid sport with elements of basketball and hockey,” Bibb said. “We don’t have to depend upon the ‘quote-unquote’ lacrosse family or fan. We can draw from the basketball fan, the hockey fan and the people going down to 7th Street looking to have a good time.”

Panther City will also target youth. “We want to get sticks in the hands of kids,” Bibb said. “If you look at pro soccer 25 years ago, it was youth soccer teams and their parents at a game. Fast forward, those kids are grown up and invested in the sport because they played the sport and now, they are coming to the game in a more traditional sense. We want to get out the kids, teach the kids, get them invested in the game and bring them out to the game.”

In addition to Philadelphia and Vancouver, Fort Worth — the league’s 14th team — joins Buffalo, Calgary, Colorado (Denver), Georgia (Atlanta area), Halifax, New England (Uncasville, Conn.), New York (Long Island), Rochester, San Diego, Saskatchewan (Saskatoon) and Toronto. ESPN recently acquired the NLL U.S and international broadcasting rights. 

According to a story from 1875, a panther was seen walking the streets of Fort Worth and fell asleep in the middle of downtown. Hence, Fort Worth was given the moniker “Panther City.” Bibb, Hamley and the NLL hopes that the Panther City Lacrosse Club arrives in Fort Worth in December with a roar, and not a yawn.