That Time a Gang War Forced a Team to Make a Uniform Change (Quick Hit #1)

 Welcome to Quick Hit! Here I will talk about small bits of news, history, and other things from across minor professional hockey!

A few months ago, not too long before the Stockton Heat's last game, I came across a story regarding an... unfortunate situation regarding the team. It involved the location of their arena and the main color of the Heat's normal dark jersey: red.

You see, Stockton Arena has an unfortunate location in regard to gang activity in the city. The area near the arena is a territory for the Crips, a gang whose choice of color is blue. Now, if you know about the Crips, you most likely know about their rival gang too, the Bloods. The Bloods, as you can likely tell via the name, wears red as their primary color choice.

So, we have a team whose primary coloris red, which means fans and players would likely wear a lot of red in and around the arena. You also have a gang in the area of the arena that wears blue and their longtime, horrid rival gang is red and the fighting between the two gangs is incredibly notorious and horrifically bloody. All that sets up is one bad reaction from the worst kind of tragedy...

As you can imagine, this caused a lot of fans to not wear anything red to games and is likely a part of the reason for the multiple black jerseys used throughout the Stockton Heat's life. Thankfully a tragedy never occurred during the Heat's life, but I hope no other current or future teams ever have to deal with this type of situation again.

-Marc aka The Prospector
https://twitter.com/ProspectorHcky