QC Mallards is an unofficial, independent fan and history site. It is not a hockey club. It is not the Quad City Mallards, it is not that franchise's successor, and it is not an official channel for it, for any league, or for any arena. Nobody here speaks for anyone.
About this domain
This site runs on myqcmallards.com, a domain that formerly hosted the Quad City Mallards' own official website. The franchise that most recently carried the name — a minor-league ice hockey team based in Moline, Illinois — ceased operations in 2018.
We state that plainly, near the top of every relevant page, because people will find this site searching for the club and should not have to work out what they are reading. There is no active organisation here to confuse anyone with, but the standard for a fan site is the same either way: never let a reader think, even briefly, that they are on an official page. We do not use the club's marks, logo or colours as our identity, and we do not republish anything from the old site.
Referring to a defunct club by name is how you write about a defunct club. Claiming to be it is not, and we do not.
What we publish
- The Mallards, carefully told — the name, the building, the shape of the club's life, and a list of what we decline to assert.
- The Quad Cities — the metro that supported the team, and why its geography is so strange.
- How the leagues fit together — NHL, AHL, ECHL and below; affiliation, contracts, call-ups.
- Why franchises move and fold — leases, gate dependency, break-even arithmetic.
- Game night — the case for minor-league hockey as a night out, with real costs.
- The community programmes — why clubs at this level run reading schemes, and what they do for a town.
We are not a news site. We do not cover scores, transactions or league business, and we will never be first with anything. What we try to be is the page that explains what everyone else assumes you already know.
Editorial stance
Three commitments, in order of importance.
We do not invent precision. Minor-league history is inconsistently documented, franchise identities are reused across leagues, and much of what circulates online is confidently wrong. Where we are unsure of a date, a league membership or a result, we describe the pattern or leave it out. You will notice this most on the history page, which carries an explicit list of things we refuse to claim. There are no standings, rosters or attendance figures anywhere on this site, and that is deliberate.
We do not publish statistics we cannot source. The calculators run entirely on assumptions you type in. Their default values are illustrative placeholders chosen to demonstrate a mechanism, labelled as such on the page. They are not reported figures for the Mallards or any other club and must never be quoted as if they were.
We separate structure from speculation. Explaining why minor-league clubs generally fail is a structural argument that can be made carefully. Explaining why one particular club failed, from secondhand accounts, is speculation about identifiable people. We do the first and not the second.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, tell us. We will fix it and say that we did, rather than quietly editing. Corrections to the historical material are especially welcome — it is the material most likely to contain errors and the hardest to source.
Trademarks
Team names, nicknames, league names and logos are the property of their respective owners and are referred to here only to identify the organisations they belong to. No endorsement, affiliation or sponsorship is implied by any such reference.