Shawn:

Bus Leagues. Playing for the passion, not the paycheck, of the sport. Long road trips through unknown cities for days on end. There’s something really romantic about the sacrifice to continue pursuing that childhood dream of playing in the big leagues.

As long as I’ve been alive, I’ve been a hockey fan. Being from the Flint area, I got to see some of the better, but mainly the worst times of the United/International Hockey League.

To this day, the best memory of my hockey life (outside of career) was the 2010 Turner Cup playoff run for the Flint Generals against the Fort Wayne Komets.

In college, I kickstarted my hockey broadcasting career by creating a multimedia hockey broadcast network for our American Collegiate Hockey Association club hockey teams. It resulted in me eventually becoming the Chief of Broadcasting of the league.

Small-town hockey holds a special place in my heart, and this site is exactly for that.

As you can view on our early website shell from the aggregated content that Rovitz and I have written for HotSprotsTakes.com, Bus League Hockey is THE home for hockey without a home for coverage.

Non-affiliated professional hockey, Junior Hockey, Senior League, and everything in between. There’s a need and a necessity for these leagues to have any kind of coverage, a place for rumors, inside sources, true discussions, and the treatment that affiliated professional hockey leagues receive.

This is a passion project of Rovitz & I, and we are beyond excited to grow this site in league coverage. The Federal Hockey League, Southern Professional Hockey League, United Hockey League, and North American Hockey League will be where our coverage starts, but as our team grows, so will our coverage.

We look forward to bringing you the hottest coverage of Bus League Hockey across every community rink and shared locker room.

Welcome to Bus League Hockey.

Rovitz:

Much like Shawn, I grew up on minor league hockey, or bus leagues as many call them. I grew in Muskegon, Michigan, a hockey hot bed that for 50-consecutive years had teams in the IHL, CoHL, UHL, then IHL again, and now has a team in the USHL.

I’ve since moved away but in my travels have covered and done play-by-play for WSHL and NAHL teams, and am fascinated by those levels of hockey. There are quality players, teams, stories and rumors about hockey at every level, and that’s what we want this site to be about.

Watching people play hockey purely for the love of the game, and with the smallest shot at moving up fascinates me. Why keep playing? Is it all worth it? How do these leagues and teams survive? These are the type of things we hope to answer at Bus League Hockey, where the more obscure the league is, the more likely we are to give it attention, because somebody has to.

Yes, there will be game coverage, but we want it to be more than that, we want to tell the story of what it’s like having to take the bus to the games every weekend, what those long hours are like, and what fans don’t know about these leagues and all that goes into them.

We’ll give these leagues and teams the coverage they deserve, but that doesn’t mean we won’t be critical, because let’s be honest, half of the fun of these leagues is seeing how much of a disaster certain teams turn out to be.

This is a project Shawn and I had been discussing for a while, and with the success we had covering the FHL over at HOTSPROTSTAKES, we decided to branch out and make this our first niche site.

So please, take a look around, and be sure to come back daily for all of the hockey news you didn’t know you cared about.

Please be sure to follow Bus League Hockey on Twitter and Facebook.