Expressing Success
ten years later, it’s hard to remember a time before the Express came to town
The winter and spring of 2005 was a time of slightly nervous anticipation in the Eau Claire area. The previous year, the city had been awarded its first notable organized-league sports franchise in decades, and now came the moment when we would know if our city could once again support something akin to the minor leagues. We built it – the team, the Fan Deck – but would they come? They sure did.
If you came here after the mid-2000s, you do not know the struggles to establish a large-scale athletic beachhead in the city, something involving the pros, or at least something with a resemblance of sorts.
This summer marks the 10th anniversary of the Eau Claire Express, and while the Northwoods League team made more of a celebration surrounding last year’s 10th season mark, I tend to focus upon brackets of time, thus this column’s decade-long remembrance. Standing at the front gates of Carson Park May 28 as people filed in for the latest Opening Night, I had to appreciate the mix of fans who have made Express games a priority on their summer agendas.
Observe: You had the baseball die-hards who may have been regular attendees at Eau Claire Bears games in the ’50s. You had the families going to the bleachers, hoping their children would get to roll around the field in massive plastic bubbles between innings. You had the twentysomethings headed to the Fan Deck to eat a lot, drink a sufficient amount, and look up when they heard the applause from the grandstand that indicates something good was happening on the field. All were there because the Express came to town.
If you came to the region after the mid-2000s, you do not know the struggles to establish a large-scale athletic beachhead in the city, something involving the pros, or at least something with a resemblance of sorts. We largely know the rich history of baseball at Carson Park; witness the Hank Aaron statue, the photos in the concourse from the early ’50s, and the plaques of the Eau Claire Baseball Hall of Fame out front. Then the Braves faded in the ’60s, and we turned into that “big suburb in the middle of nowhere,” which described much of what inhibited Eau Claire’s attractiveness in the latter part of the 20th century, but applied to organized athletics as well.
At least we had the Cavaliers to fill some of the gap, regularly piling up the “W’s” under Glenn St. Arnault and Harv Tomter, but the seasons seemed to just sort of end, no big championship game to provide the climax that draws many of us to watch sports in the first place. Smaller La Crosse had minor league basketball teams in the Catbirds and Bobcats, but our arena debates never went beyond the proverbial debate stage. In 1971, we were looking to build a new area. In 1985, we were looking to build a new area. In 1995, The C.O.W. Report on public access TV was training its “arena cam” on an empty parking lot to mock the effort to build a new arena. Do you build downtown to bring folks back to the city center, or are the roads too cramped? How do you pay for it? What will ever bring league sports to Eau Claire?
Baseball provided that answer. Seemingly out of the blue in 2004, there were two summer collegiate leagues that, er, expressed interest in putting teams in the city. One was an upstart, the other the well-established Northwoods League. Could we really grab hold, or would the usual city skepticism over funding and facility upgrades torpedo another opportunity to move beyond our status as a large small town?
Not only did we grab hold, we embraced the Express, and surely the atmosphere they fostered. That first July 4th, Carson Park was practically sold-out, and the crowds seemingly grew by the year. The Carson Park baseball stadium is now a summer destination for residents of the Chippewa Valley, especially in that key 25-54 demo. They are buying tickets and concessions, wearing black and burnt orange, and having a good time making Eau Claire feel more big-time.
The Express have been here long enough that one now has to try to remember the prior quiet athletic era. What helped us in that era is another city baseball team celebrating an anniversary this year: the Cavaliers … the focus of my next column.
