Roller Hockey International
inline hockey league
Roller Hockey International was a professional inline hockey league that operated in North America from 1993 to 1999. It was the first major professional league for inline hockey.
History
League president Dennis Murphy had been involved in the establishment of the American Basketball Association, World Hockey Association and World TeamTennis. RHI hoped to capitalize on the inline skating boom of the early 1990s. Key parts of its success were its stance on no guaranteed contracts. Instead, teams would all split prize money.
Teams were generally made up of minor league ice hockey players playing on inline skates during the summer months between ice seasons.
Murphy saw big potential for the sport and believed that inline hockey could become the number one hockey sport in the US. The league had plans to expand to up to 24 teams, including some from Europe, by 1997. However, RHI became known for its unstable franchises, instability in the league's front office itself, little media coverage and many teams struggling to attract crowds - while the Anaheim Bullfrogs led in attendance with an average of 9,800 per game, seven teams attracted less than 4,000 per game on average, while the whole league's attendance averaged around 5,000 by 1996.
Ultimately, after five seasons of play and a fading in the inline skating boom, RHI folded in 1998 with two of its franchises joining Major League Roller Hockey: the Buffalo Wings and its premier club, the Anaheim Bullfrogs.
“Roller Hockey International” enters the record as inline hockey league. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Roller, Hockey and International can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2164105. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1993, 1999, 1997 and 1996.
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This entry incorporates text from “Roller Hockey International” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.