Bring the big leagues to Wyoming!

Everybody knows that 48th annual Super Bowl, featuring the Denver Broncos versus the Seattle Seahawks, is coming up this Sunday. I’ve never been in the Platte Valley during the Super Bowl, but I can predict it’s going to be a huge deal. I’m sure every bar in town will be showing it on TV, and people will be at home glued to their televisions or computers. Super Bowl house parties will most likely sprout up across the Valley. Of course, I don’t need to ask if people here are Broncos fans, since Denver is the closest city to us with a major professional sports team of any kind. This brings up a rather lame issue to have, but I can’t help but feel bad that Denver, our closest city with a major pro-sports team, is almost four hours away. I feel like Wyoming needs a major pro-sports team to represent itself, and one that is within closer driving distance. With so many die-hard sports fans in the state, why couldn’t Wyoming have at least one ? Why do Wyoming sports fans have to be deprived of a major pro-sports team to call their own, and have to glom on to one or more in a different state?

Before I moved to Wyoming, I had always been surrounded by major professional sports teams for nearly my entire life. In California, I got to grow up near the Forty-Niners and Raiders for football, the Giants and A’s for baseball, the Warriors and Kings for basketball, the Sharks for hockey and the Earthquakes for soccer. Before I moved here, I had the Jazz for basketball and Real Salt Lake for soccer in Utah. Coming from all that, I sometimes feel bad that Wyoming has no major pro-sports teams, or any that are within an hour or even two-hour driving distance. I know we have sporting events at the University of Wyoming an hour-and-a-half away, but it would be fun to see a major pro-sports game every once in a while. This gets me thinking: I feel that either Cheyenne or Casper could handle at least one major pro sports team. We have enough sports fans in eastern Wyoming who would travel to games, and who would be pleased to not have to travel to Denver for the closest one. Casper also has the huge Casper Events Center, which could easily house a major pro basketball or hockey team, and I’m sure Cheyenne has some kind of venue that could host games.

The issue on everyones’ minds, I’m sure, is that Wyoming’s big cities (meaning big for Wyoming, that is) are not large enough to support even one pro sports team. However, some may forget about the small city of Green Bay, Wis., which has the Green Bay Packers, a pro-football team that has been around for more than 90 years. Green Bay only has a little more than 100,000 people, and it also has no huge suburbs to give it a big metro population. Cheyenne and Casper are both growing cities with currently around 60,000 people each, and as I mentioned before, there are people in all those outlying eastern Wyoming towns who would travel to games. Growing Natrona County, which has Casper, also has nearly 79,000 people, while growing Laramie County, which has Cheyenne, has nearly 95,000 people. Cheyenne also has the added benefit of being located at the northernmost end of the growing Front Range Urban Corridor of Northern Colorado. A major pro sports team in Cheyenne could easily attract fans from Fort Collins, and from all those other Northern Colorado cities on or near Interstate 25.

Maybe I sound like I’m talking crazy because I miss living close to a professional sports team. I miss being able to drive a short distance to go to a game any time I feel like it, and act like I have a team to call “my own”. But who knows, maybe as Wyoming continues to grow, we could get at least one professional sports team here in the near future.