Utah Indoor Football League: UIFL Archives News
| ||
 |
Salt Lake Tribune News article, Feb. 5, 2001
| ||
|
Curran Making Another Go With Utah Indoor Football League
The Salt Lake Tribune Football Sunday, December 26, 1999
Curran Is Making Another Go of It
With Utah Indoor Football League
Former Catzz owner starts over inside West Jordan warehouse-style building
By Kurt Kragthorpe
The Salt Lake Tribune
In his first indoor football experience, Michael Curran went through two head coaches by the middle of the season, lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, cancelled the last away game and folded the franchise.
Otherwise the experience was wonderful. That’s why Curran is spending his winter Saturdays in a warehouse-style building called the Port of Sports, organizing 11 teams into the Utah Indoor Football League and trying to rebuild interest in the sport.
“If I would have started this way. . .” Curran says, himself wondering how that sentence might have ended.
Curran launched the Utah Catzz franchise in the Professional Indoor Football League (now the IPFL) in 1998, figuring that he could market the team in the spring and summer in Orem, not far from where 65,000 fans watch Brigham Young play outdoor football in the fall. The team featured ex-BYU quarterback Paul Shoemaker and many other players with Utah ties, yet never developed a real following and had all kinds of problems, on and off the field.
Having missed on chances to bring in investors in the hopes of funding a move to the E Center in West Valley City, Curran gave up on the Catzz. But he’s back in the game. ”It only took me a little while to lick my wounds and jump back into it,” he says.
Which is where Troy Long, the Stripling Warriors and the Wild Boys come into the story. Besides offering them a return to glory — “I never thought I’d play again,” many of them tell Curran — He’s trying to build an indoor football fan base for his next pro attempt.
Long is a former Alta High and BYU defensive back who played three years of Arena Football with the Denver Dynamite in the early 90’s. He had not played football for six years until this month, making a comeback as the Sting’s player coach.
“The fun thing about it is once you have that first hard hit, it all comes back.” Says Long, 33 “I’m glad my body’s still holding together.”
Long made three interceptions in a recent game, and was surprised by his reaction ability: “Something just twitched and said, 'Go get the ball.'”
He also likes the way receivers have no chance to step out of bounds and avoid his tackles, the way they could in college football. Indoors, they are hemmed in by dasher boards.
At the Port of Sports, Dan Kotler is using another of his inventions. The creator of the Sportcourt surfaces for sports such as basketball and roller hockey, Kotler is marketing soft dasher boards that give on impact, reducing the chance of injury.
The Port of Sports version of indoor football is played with eight players on a side, on a field that’s 60 yards long and 23 yards wide, with an overhanging net that keeps passes and kickoffs low. In fact, kickoffs are among the most exciting plays, with footballs bouncing off the walls and becoming tricky to handle.
The League includes players of ages 18 to 45, skewed toward the younger end. Many of the South Valley Sabercats are recent Bingham High graduates; the Stripling Warriors — named after a book of Mormon reference — include several returned missionaries and others who are about to leave on missions. Saia Vaivaka rushed for 99 yards in a Jordan High’s loss to Skyline in the ’98 Class 5-A state championship game, and now he’s a Stripling Warrior. Kaisa Kinikini, the team owner and a 260-pound fullback, installs flooring and talks of joining the University of Utah football team as a walk-on at the age of 22.
The Storm’s roster includes drivers, printers, mechanics, loan officers and movers, paying $65 (plus equipment costs) to play 10 games.
Curran figures that 11 teams of 25 players each – with more teams expected to compete next year--- translates to hundreds of indoor football fans that could support another pro team. He’s convinced that an arena team is coming to the Salt Lake Valley,in one way or another.
Curran says the E Center turned down a bid from a proposed IPFL franchise, which suggests to him that Utah Grizzlies owner David Elmore has ideas of launching his own team in the new Arena2 league. And Delta Center officials have told him that the Arena Football League has discussed placing a team in the building.
“A pro team will be here,” Curran says. And even after everything that went wrong with the Catzz--- maybe because of that, actually--- Curran hopes to run that team as general manger. For now, he’s looking for a sponsor who could make the Utah Indoor Football Leagues’s inaugural championship game in March a big-time event.
“What we’re doing now is developing the sport,” he says.
