Sporting Events
The arena has hosted NCAA Division 1 college basketball games (including the Mid-Continent Conference men's basketball tournament from 1996–99) in addition to several NHL and NBA exhibition contests. The now-defunct Quad City Thunder basketball team played all their home games at the i wireless Center from 1993 until the Continental Basketball Association folded six years later. Hockey has also been played at the arena since 1995. The first 12 years by the Quad City Mallards of the United Hockey League then two years as the Quad City Flames of the American Hockey League before moving to Abbotsford, British Columbia. After the Flames left, the Quad City Mallards were reincarnated in June 2009, and are still playing at the arena. In 2009, Western Illinois University's club hockey team, the Fighting Leathernecks, became the most recent inhabitants of the arena. They are still playing there even though they are only allowed 4 games per season at the venue.
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Famous quotes containing the words sporting and/or events:
“The Boston papers had never told me that there were seals in the harbor. I had always associated these with the Esquimaux and other outlandish people. Yet from the parlor windows all along the coast you may see families of them sporting on the flats. They were as strange to me as the merman would be. Ladies who never walk in the woods, sail over the sea. To go to sea! Why, it is to have the experience of Noah,—to realize the deluge. Every vessel is an ark.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The system was breaking down. The one who had wandered alone past so many happenings and events began to feel, backing up along the primal vein that led to his center, the beginning of hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center to the extremities of life, the suburbs through which one makes one’s way to where the country is.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)