Vintage Apparel & Collectibles for Texas Minor League Hockey Teams

Twenty-four defunct franchises, from the CHL to the WPHL, on shirts, jerseys, hats, hoodies, and drinkware.

Texas is not the first state anyone thinks of when they think of hockey, which is exactly why the history here is worth knowing. Teams have been skating in this state since 1941, and most of them are gone. We make apparel for those clubs, in many cases the only apparel that exists for them anywhere.

We're a family-run small business bringing back the designs and the histories of long-lost hockey teams from Texas and across the US and Canada.

Skip to the history of hockey in Texas

Abilene Aviators Amarillo Gorillas Amarillo Rattlers Amarillo Wranglers Austin Ice Bats Border City / Texarkana Bandits Central Texas Stampede Dallas Black Hawks Dallas Freeze Dallas Stallions Dallas Texans El Paso Buzzards Fort Worth Fire Fort Worth Texans Fort Worth Wings Houston Aeros Houston Apollos Houston is a Hockey Town Lubbock Cotton Kings San Angelo Outlaws San Antonio Dragons San Antonio Iguanas San Antonio Rampage Waco Wizards

Hockey Teams in Texas

Given the cowboy culture and the temperatures, Texas probably isn't the first place that comes to mind for hockey. The state has a deeper history with the sport than that suggests, running from the 1940s to the present day.

The roots go back to 1941, when two teams debuted in the American Hockey Association, the forerunner of the United States Hockey League. The Dallas Texans and the Fort Worth Rangers both took the ice, and both lasted one season before going on hiatus when the United States entered the war. They restarted in 1945 and played through 1948–49. You can draw a reasonably straight line from those two clubs to the Fort Worth Wings and Dallas Black Hawks rivalry of the 1970s, and on to the arrival of the Dallas Stars in 1993.

Hockey in the Metroplex

Fort Worth has carried more of this history than any other city in the state. After the Rangers folded in the 1940s, the game came back with the Fort Worth Texans and Fort Worth Wings, who ran from 1967 to 1982 in the Central Hockey League and developed a genuinely bad-tempered rivalry with Dallas. In the 1990s the Fort Worth Fire picked it up again in the CHL, and people in that city still talk about them.

Across the Metroplex, the Dallas Black Hawks and later the Dallas Freeze were the other half of it. The Black Hawks, founded in 1967 in the CHL, did the work of building a hockey audience in the region through the 1970s, mostly by playing Fort Worth. Both the Black Hawks and the Wings went out of business in 1982, and the Freeze picked up the thread in the CHL in the 1990s, restarting the same fight with the Fire.

Every one of those clubs eventually failed, and collectively they proved the point: hockey worked in Dallas and Fort Worth. The Stars arriving from Minnesota was the consequence.

Shop Dallas Black Hawks Shop Fort Worth Fire

Hockey in Houston

Houston's hockey goes back to 1946 and the Houston Skippers of the USHL, and the city is still perennially rumored to be closing in on an NHL team it has never quite got.

The modern run started in the late 1960s with the Houston Apollos, a Montreal Canadiens affiliate that lasted only a few years. What came next was the Houston Aeros of the World Hockey Association, who started play in 1972 and in their second season did something no other team in hockey has done: they signed a 45-year-old Gordie Howe out of retirement, along with his sons Mark and Marty.

Howe then won the WHA's MVP award that season, at 45, and the Aeros took the AVCO World Trophy in 1974 and again in 1975. The Howes left for the New England Whalers in 1977, and the Aeros lasted one more season without them before folding, having failed to get into the NHL. The Apollos reappeared briefly in the CHL afterward and did not last either.

The name came back in 1994 on an AHL franchise with a completely different identity: green instead of blue and white, and a B-23 bomber logo. That version ran until 2013, winning playoff titles in 1999 and 2003, then moved to Iowa. Houston has had no professional hockey since.

Shop Houston Aeros

Amarillo: Wranglers, Gorillas, and Rattlers

Amarillo got hockey in 1968 with the original CHL Wranglers, the first team to bring the game to the Panhandle. The Rattlers and Gorillas brought it back in the 1990s and 2000s. Three teams, three good names, and a town that kept turning up for all of them.

San Antonio: Iguanas, Dragons, and Rampage

The Iguanas arrived in the 1990s with orange and purple and a logo nobody forgets. Then the Dragons moved in as well, briefly giving San Antonio two minor league teams at once, which is one more than the market wanted. Neither lasted long. The Rampage then ran for nearly two decades before leaving in 2020.

From Abilene to Waco

There have been too many minor league teams in Texas to list properly, but the attempt is worth making. The Abilene Aviators managed two seasons in the WPHL behind an excellent aviator logo. The Austin Ice Bats ran from 1996 to 2008 with real support in the capital. Belton, which is not a large place by Texas standards, had the Central Texas Stampede in the WPHL from 1996 to 2001.

Out west there were the El Paso Buzzards, and El Paso still has the Rhinos. Hidalgo housed the Rio Grande Valley Killer Bees of the CHL for nine years, and the Laredo Bucks lasted ten in the Gateway City. San Angelo had the Outlaws and the Saints, and no hockey at all since 2005. The Corpus Christi Ice Rays and Odessa Jackalopes are both still going.

And the Waco Wizards played from 1996 to 2000 with one of the best logos in the history of the sport, which is not a claim we make lightly.

Most of these clubs failed, and all of them left something behind. That's the part worth wearing.

Shop another state  ·  All teams A to Z  ·  Jerseys