From all outward indications, it was just another day at the Centennial Sportsplex. The outdoor tennis courts played host to a few late-morning matches, while inside, the center’s tranquil lobby was inhabited only by a handful of youngsters and the unmistakable scent of chlorine. But farther within the facility, the silence eventually gave way to the white noise of skates carving ice, the staccato smacks of wood on wood, and emphatic, reverberating shouts all emanating from Rink B. Set off in its own section of the complex, the Nashville Predators’ third annual training camp was well under way.

Roughly equivalent to baseball’s spring training, this series of practices, scrimmages, and exhibition games affords Predators management the opportunity to assess the state of the organization. New faces vie for spots on the team. Returning players emerge from the off-season in various states of fitness. Eighteen-year-old draft picks get their first look at the big leagues, before ultimately returning to their junior teams for another year or two of seasoning. It’s an important three weeks, when decisions are made that could potentially affect the team for years to come.

As the man responsible for making these decisions, Predators executive vice president and general manager David Poile sits at a rinkside table and calmly dissects the current scrimmage. With the assistance of a number of coaches and scouts, he must whittle away nearly 40 players while assembling a final roster that will soon embark on the franchise’s third season in the National Hockey League. But the process isn’t nearly as arbitrary as it might sound; Poile and his staff are following a blueprint for success that was crafted well before the first player was signed. It’s a plan that preaches patience, homegrown talent, and no quick-fix schemes. And according to Poile, the Predators are right on schedule.

“It’s taking shape,” he says, speaking over the din of the spirited contest taking place only a few feet away. “I think we all feel that, we all see that. Would we like it to be quicker or faster? The answer is yes, but in reality this is the way it has to be.”

For two seasons, the Nashville Predators have fielded a hardworking hockey club that has produced very respectable results for an expansion franchise. Beginning with a foundation of players like goaltender Mike Dunham and defenseman Drake Berehowsky, whose talents were either underutilized or underdeveloped by other NHL outfits, Poile has slowly but steadily planted and nurtured a crop of younger talent designed to supplement the team’s core players before ultimately becoming the core themselves.

With no real star players to speak of, the Predators have found direction and identity in names like Tom Fitzgerald, Cliff Ronning, Patric Kjellberg, and Bill Houlder. Now, with skilled 1998 draft picks David Legwand and Karlis Skrastins beginning to make significant impacts, and with gritty 2000 pick Scott Hartnell bulldozing his way into the lineup this fall, the organization’s long-range plan is inching its way from a concept on paper toward reality on ice.

Still, no one expects the Predators to make serious waves in the NHL this season. Poile continues to point to a time five years down the road when he thinks he’ll have the team he and his staff initially set out to create. For now, the organization presses on methodically, satisfied to be at this point and a bit surprised by its successes along the way—successes that have positioned the Nashville Predators as a role model, both on and off the ice, for future expansion teams to follow.

He doesn’t say it directly, but it’s obvious that Predators owner Craig Leipold is getting a bit of a thrill out of watching the expansion franchises in St. Paul, Minn., and Columbus, Ohio, scramble to prepare for their first seasons in the National Hockey League. After all, he was in the same situation three years ago when Nashville, those two cities, and Atlanta were each awarded expansion teams. But remarkably, the preparation that has taken the St. Paul and Columbus organizations three years, and took Atlanta’s franchise two years, was accomplished by Leipold and his staff in just a fraction of the time.

“I’m amazed at what our organization was able to do in less than 12 months when I see all the work that the other franchises had to do,” he says. “Which is the same thing we did, but they had three years to do it in. And to this day, they say, ‘Man, I wish we had another year.’ ”

Leipold, a Wisconsin-based businessman who has become famous in Nashville for his approachability and fan-like support of his team, cites a variety of factors that went into his decision to plant an expansion franchise in Nashville—including the city’s political environment and the plethora of Nashville professionals eager to entertain customers—but he says the city’s arena played the biggest role in landing the team. “Frankly, without the arena it would not have happened,” he says. The downtown facility was already completed in June 1997 when the NHL awarded Leipold an expansion franchise, while arenas in the three other named expansion cities were in various states of construction. So when the NHL wanted the Nashville franchise to begin play in Oct. 1999, alongside the Atlanta team, Leipold was able to use the presence of the arena to persuade the league otherwise.

“We were adamant that we come in before,” he says. “We’d fought so hard to get the expansion franchise, we had the arena ready to go, we had our staff ready, we knew who we wanted as our general manager. We convinced the league that to hold off a year would have stopped the momentum that we had.”

In October 1998, the Nashville Predators played their first regular season game in the National Hockey League. Through an expansion draft that allowed the Predators to select unprotected players from each of the league’s teams, and through various free-agent signings and trades, GM David Poile and his staff assembled what appeared to be a solid expansion team on paper. But many of Poile’s moves also pointed to the future, as he dealt some of his more talented—but aging and expensive—expansion draft pick-ups to other teams for extra draft choices in the 1999 and 2000 NHL entry drafts.

Knowing wins might be few and far between during the first season, Leipold and his staff had to make sure fans were going to leave the arena with smiles on their faces whether the home team won or lost. “The first year we didn’t know how good a team we were going to have on the ice,” Leipold admits. “You have just no idea. So we placed a very high value to entertaining our customers. And we really set the bar for entertaining your sports customers in the league.”

From pregame laser shows and live bands performing during game intermissions to a roaming Puck Patrol cheerleading squad and giveaways that last season included a free Phillips home, the Predators staff has mastered the techniques necessary to generate a steady—and increasing—flow of fans through the arena turnstiles. And despite Leipold’s first-year jitters, the on-ice product has turned out to be quite entertaining as well. Posting 28 wins in each of its first two seasons—a respectable mark for an expansion club—the team has won fans thanks in large part to a tireless work ethic, an underdog mentality, and a number of young players with tremendous potential. One only needs to look at the numbers for proof: According to the organization, season attendance rose from an impressive first-season total of 664,282 fans to 680,582 last year, reaching 97 percent of capacity and including 20 sellouts.

“Ideally, what we’ve set out to do is be competitive in three to five years,” says Predators head coach Barry Trotz. “I think we’ve been pretty competitive for two years—a lot more competitive than people thought we would be, a lot more competitive than even we thought we would be.”

While an electric atmosphere inside the arena can go a long way toward drawing fans, the success or failure of any sports team eventually comes down to wins, playoff berths, and championships. It’s a reality that the Predators’ front office clearly understands, but just as the team is relatively new to the league, the city of Nashville is relatively new to the sport. That fact has diffused much of the pressure on the team to win more games, and it has also made Nashville a fertile environment for players to develop.

“With expansion, the players that you get are the guys that are maybe a little fragile,” Trotz says. “They’ve been the guys that haven’t been able to stick [with other teams]—they’ve been sent up and down to the minors, back and forth. I’ve seen some players grow in the last three years who were extremely insecure about their position on the hockey club. I think just having that cushion of maybe not being in the pressure cooker...is very good for the hockey club. Now that we’re starting to get a little bit older, in this three- to five-year period, the hockey knowledge will grow [among fans] and there will be more pressure.

“But the one thing that’s common I think, and it doesn’t matter if you’re here or you’re in New York City or Montreal, is that if you’re working extremely hard, people can tell if you’re doing that or not. And when you’re doing that, I think you can always hold your head up high and people will recognize that and support you. When they don’t support you is when you’re not trying as hard as you can.”

Before joining the Predators, David Poile served for 15 years as vice president and general manager for the Washington Capitals, who made the playoffs 14 times during his tenure. Prior to that, he worked in the front office of the 1972 expansion Atlanta Flames (a franchise that moved to Calgary in 1980), where he eventually climbed to the rank of assistant general manager. He admits that those years of experience have certainly taught him one thing when it comes to building an expansion team: “Patience,” he says, laughing as if to imply it was a hard-learned lesson.

“If we’re going to do this right,” Poile continues, “and if we’re going to be a good team and a competitive team for a lot of years—and not just a flash in the pan—I firmly believe there’s only one way to do it, and that is the way we are doing it. It’s drafting the younger players and giving them the time to develop and eventually putting them on our hockey club. I don’t think hockey is any different from any other things in life: There are no quick fixes.”

In a nutshell, the team’s long-range plan for building a consistent Stanley Cup contender centers on the NHL’s annual summer entry draft. Just as in the other major professional sports leagues, NHL teams meet yearly to lay claim to the hottest prospects in the world. But unlike other sports, hockey’s draft differs in that players are selected at a much younger age and are rarely ready to make the huge step directly onto a professional hockey club. Draftees usually return to their Canadian junior team or a minor-league affiliate of the NHL franchise for one to three years of additional experience. Many fizzle and never even see the big leagues. Taking these factors into account, the Predators’ long-term blueprint will, according to Poile, require roughly seven years to implement fully.

“Every year you have approximately nine picks in the draft—there are nine rounds—so the goal is to get at least three players that would [eventually] play for the Predators every year,” he says. “So after seven years...that would mean you have 15 players that would be age 20 to 25. That would be 15 players on our team that we’ve sort of homegrown and drafted, and to me we would have one of the best and youngest teams in the National Hockey League.”

Ever since the first expansion teams began entering the league in 1967, organizations have typically taken one of two differing approaches in search of success. Those with the luxury of deep pockets have stocked their teams with more experienced and talented players, later struggling when the aging core of veterans moves past its prime or retires. Those who are more conservative struggle for the first few years en route to what hopefully becomes more consistent success in the long run. Naturally, Nashville falls into the latter category.

“You just can’t go out in this day and age and decide you’re going to hire or bring in three or four or five different $5 million players,” Leipold says. “And frankly with this kind of game, in hockey, it’s proven that that doesn’t work anyway. You really need a full team—hockey is a game of teamwork.

“The way that we’re going to grow—we’ve said this from day one—is that we’re going to do it within our organization and we’re going to do it with the draft. And David Poile has done an absolutely remarkable job of getting in good, young, strong players that are getting bigger and bigger every year and getting better every year, and I believe the city has bought into that strategy.”

Poile points out other advantages to developing younger talent, such as the Predators’ first-round pick in 1998, David Legwand. “Yes, I think we could get marginally better by signing a [proven veteran] player,” he admits. “But look at last year. Legwand could have gone back to play junior, and I don’t say that that’s right or wrong, but he played for us [instead]. If we would have signed another veteran player, then we probably would have had to sign him for three years, bigger dollars, and David Legwand wouldn’t have played. Now we’re playing Legwand regularly, so we’ve got a 19-year-old—now a 20-year-old—in our lineup versus a 33- or 34-year-old player. We don’t want to be just marginally better. Once we become competitive, we want to be competitive for a lot of years.”

One expansion franchise that went the veteran route is the Florida Panthers. Upon entering the NHL in 1993, the Panthers posted winning percentages of .494 and .479 in their first and second seasons, respectively. Then the team took the hockey world by storm, reaching the Stanley Cup Finals in just its third year. Tom Fitzgerald, captain of the Predators since the team’s first game, was a member of that Florida team. “We’re a lot younger here,” he says. “The team philosophy is different. If you look at the average age of that team, particularly in their third year, it’s probably close to 28, 29, maybe even 30. Here I would say it’s 24, 25.

“Here, you look around the room and you see a lot of the same faces, so in that way it’s different, because we had a lot of new faces down in Florida that third year, starting with the coaching staff. Here it’s status quo, but they’re throwing the ball into the players’ court, saying, ‘It’s time for you to raise the bar and step up. You’ve got two years underneath your belt.’ With expansion, a lot of guys got the opportunity to play a lot of minutes, where they weren’t playing in other organizations. It’s time to raise [the bar] again.”

Such a mandate wouldn’t be possible for a team with much turnover, but Nashville’s players have been sticking around. “We have a lot of guys that have been here since day one,” says Poile. “I think you could compare this to almost any expansion team, and I don’t think too many could say that starting their third year.” So instead of having to reeducate new players on the technical aspects of his strategy, Trotz can now concentrate on fine-tuning various aspects of the team’s play while expecting the bulk of the players to be comfortable with the system.

As a whole, Predators coaches and management aren’t predicting major improvements for the team this season. Still, the stated goal is to make the playoffs, and Poile is asking each returning player to contribute just a bit more this time around. For example, if a player scored five goals last year, Poile might ask him to score 10 this year. Or if a player had a face-off win percentage of 45 percent, Poile might ask him to increase that to 50 percent. These incremental improvements, the general manager explains, can make a huge difference in a team game like hockey. “If that doesn’t happen,” he says, “then we won’t be better; we’ll be worse. Because I can guarantee you we won’t be the same.”

Likewise, Trotz seeks similar gradual advances in the league standings. The Predators earned 70 points last season—wins are worth two points while ties and overtime losses are worth one—and Trotz foresees the team improving by seven to 10 points each of the next few years. “This next three- to five-year period is a situation where [we’re] not going to make great strides,” he says. “It has to be very consistent.

“We just don’t match up with the [opposing teams’] star players very good yet, because we’re still developing our star players. In our second, third, and fourth lines we’re as strong as anybody right now, and our four through eight defensemen are very strong. We just need those top three defensemen and we need that top line to really, I think, get over the hump.”

Trotz recalls the first season, when the team went into every game feeling like the underdog. “Every time you win a game, it’s like winning a playoff game or a series or something,” he says. Last year that changed, as Nashville was considered as good as or better than teams like the New York Islanders or the Tampa Bay Lightning. This year, the Predators will be favored over even more teams, with expansion clubs in Minnesota and Columbus entering the league. Losing any of those games will bring about new emotions for the young team—“growing pains,” as Trotz calls them.

On the whole, the Nashville Predators organization has handled its growing pains quite well—so well, in fact, that the three expansion teams that followed Nashville into the league have borrowed many a page from the Predators’ playbook. “We were absolutely the expansion model,” Leipold says. “So those cities have spent a fair amount of time at our games. Particularly at the end of last year, they were sending 10 people down to all the games, just spending weeks down here to go through the whole game presentation: how we get ready for games, how we script it out, all the things that we do.

“We’re proud of that fact, that people look at us and say, ‘You know, we want to have the same type presentation that the Nashville Predators do.’ We think that speaks well of our people.”

And the borrowing didn’t stop with matters of organization or game entertainment. When filling their rosters, the NHL’s newest teams learned from Nashville’s successes. “Minnesota and Columbus copied a lot of our ideas,” Poile says. “The one that jumps out at me is the fact that they both signed a number of European players as free agents, realizing that oftentimes those players can be much more valuable players and contribute to a team versus even some guys that you get in the expansion draft.”

While everyone from the owner down to the players readily admits the Predators franchise remains far from its intended goal, the past three years have been nothing short of remarkable: The organization has turned the typically Northern recreation of ice hockey into a Southern staple. The sport moves faster than a football game, features more collisions than a NASCAR race, and packs enough drama to keep even showbiz-jaded Nashvillians returning for more. Middle Tennesseans are for the first time incorporating words like “icing” and “five hole” into their everyday vocabulary, and tongue-twisting player pronunciations like “Kjellberg” and “Skrbek” are rolling off their tongues. Country music celebrities and Tennessee Titans can be counted among the team’s loyal following, and many Predators players are becoming fixtures in the Nashville community with regular appearances at events and fundraisers. In short, there’s a palpable buzz in the air.

Meanwhile, the team stands poised at the beginning of another season, with another opportunity to build upon the surprising story that has become the Nashville Predators. “Fans might say, ‘Are you going to make the playoffs this year?’ ” says captain Tom Fitzgerald. “Well, we’re going to give it everything we have. I’m not going out on a limb and making bold statements, but I can guarantee one thing: This team is going to go out onto the ice every night and succeed. We might not win every game, but we’re going to be in every game, and if we’re in every game, then we give ourselves a chance to win every game.”

As each season leads to new chapters in the Predators’ tale, so too will they lead to increased expectations. It’s an inevitability that has already begun to bubble to the surface—an inevitability for which Craig Leipold and his Predators organization are well prepared. “There clearly is more pressure on us,” Leipold says of the forthcoming season. “And we feel the pressure. We feel it more this year than we did last year. Next year we’re going to feel it more, and every year after that we’re going to feel it more. But the bottom line is we have a strategy, we think it’s the right strategy, and we’re going to stick to that.”