ARIZONA RATTLERS

Rattlers coach Guy talks Tucson ownership, arena renovations

Feb 15, 2019, 4:10 PM | Updated: 4:46 pm

(Vince Marotta/Arizona Sports)...

(Vince Marotta/Arizona Sports)

(Vince Marotta/Arizona Sports)

Kevin Guy finds himself in quite the unique situation.

Guy is currently the head coach of the Indoor Football League’s Arizona Rattlers, a position he has held since 2008 and had a lot of success in. More recently, however, he and his wife Cathy became the co-owners of the league’s newest expansion team, the Tucson Sugar Skulls.

Guy talked about this interesting arrangement on Doug and Wolf Friday morning as part of Newsmakers Week on 98.7 F.M. Arizona’s Sports Station.

“I’ve had a lot of conversations with [Rattlers’ owner] Ron Shurts, and in the last 10 years we’ve been pretty successful here at the Arizona Rattlers,” Guy said. “He’s always pushing me to keep building my brand, and an opportunity came up at the league level and it was accepted at the league level. We have to do some things outside the box to grow our league.

“You look at some of these other new leagues that have popped up, and you have one owner that owns every team, and you look at the Arena League, there’s six teams and two owners own all six of them. We’re no different. We’ve got to do some things outside the box, and there was an opportunity there in Tucson.”

Guy also talked about the newly debuted Alliance of American Football, and their possible competition against the Arizona Hotshots.

“I wish them all the success in the world, but the Arizona Rattlers have been in this market since 1992,” Guy said. “We’ve done a lot in this community over the 26 years that we’ve been in this market, and just this last year we became the first program in Indoor and Arena Football history to win over 300 football games.

“We averaged over 14,000 a game last year, and we had one game over 18,000 and two over 16,000. We’re very confident in who we are and what we’ve done for this community.”

Finally, Guy gave a teaser for where the team will play when renovations to Talking Stick Resort Arena begin over the summer.

“We’re looking at some options, but I kinda know where we’re going,” Guy said. “We will be in our market, we’re not leaving our market.”

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