Does Cedar Springs Have a Secret Professional Hockey Team?
Like a lot of people, I start my day catching up on the news headlines. Some days you even learn something you didn't know the day before.
I have lived in Cedar Springs for about 12 years now. I thought I knew just about everything about this little northern Kent County town with a 2019 census count of me and 3,665 other residents.
It's a small little town. The U.S. Census Bureau says the city has a total area of only 2.02 square miles.
What is Cedar Springs Known For?
It is probably most famous for it's Red Flannel. The history behind the red flannel underwear is that in the winter of 1936 a New York feature wrote about how it was the "worst winter in years" and that there were no red flannels in the USA to go with it. The local newspaper, "The Cedar Springs Clipper", responded that the merchants in Cedar Springs had red flannels. The story was picked up by newspapers around the country. Orders for the red flannels went crazy. To honor the success of the Red Flannels, Cedar Springs has their Red Flannel Festival every year, held the last weekend in September and the first weekend in October. (Yes, I do have a pair of Red Flannel underwear, but I am not modeling them today.)
We even have a celebrity that was born and raised in Cedar Springs...Actor, writer and comedian Brad Slaight. He has appeared on TV shows like "Parks and Recration", and "Married...With Children". He also spent two years co-starring at Izzy Adams on "The Young and The Restless". He also has been a contributing writer and producer for many television shows. His standup comedy has been featured on several TV shows and he was once voted "Comedian of the Year" by Playboy. You can see his website at www.bradslaight.com.
Here is a YouTube via spotlighting Brad Slaight as a Cedar Springs Red Hawk...
Does Cedar Springs Have a Professional Hockey Team?
What I never knew was that Cedar Springs had a United States Hockey League (USHL) team. Wait? We have a professional hockey team in Cedar Springs? That is news to me.
According to an mlive.com article this morning, the headline read "Muskegon Lumberjacks rout Cedar Springs, advance to USHL Conference Semifinals".
I know that there is the Cedar Rock Sports Plex, just off of Northland Drive, where they play hockey games, but to my knowledge we don't have a professional hockey team.
So I did some digging...and I'm sorry to report that we DO NOT have a USHL team. The official USHL website shows that the Muskegon Lumberjacks played the Cedar Rapids Roughriders on Tuesday, April 27th, not the Cedar Springs Roughriders. The Cedar Rapids Roughriders are based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa -- not Cedar Springs, MI. It was just an error in the mlive story. Perhaps it was autocorrect taking over again! You can find out more about the Cedar Rapids team on their Facebook page.
So unfortunately, we do NOT have a USHL hockey team in Cedar Springs. And it's too bad they were knocked out of the Conference Semifinals. But, we can definitely cheer on the Muskegon Lumberjacks as they advance to the Semifinals.
If we did have a professional hockey team in Cedar Springs, you know they would have to be called the "Red Flannels" and the uniforms would have to be red and made of flannel material!