Firebirds hockey team serves as unifying force for diverse Coachella Valley

Hockey is the least diverse sport on the planet. Or, something like that.

But Monday night in the Sonoran Desert, a wonderfully diverse crowd watched the Coachella Valley Firebirds advance to the Calder Cup Finals in the team's inaugural season.

Kids from Indio in Firebirds costumes danced by the acrylic rink wall. Grandmas from Canada in orange-and-black Daccord jerseys chanted "Joey, Joey, Joey" when the team's goalie gloved slapshots from the Milwaukee Admirals.

Whole families filled rows behind the net. Couples kissed when the ‘Birds won.

Coachella Valley is home to white-glove tennis and golf affairs that attract international audiences of a certain variety. These tournaments are diverse in a particular way, but they are not a full and total reflection of the rich complexity of the people living in the shadow of the Santa Rosa Mountains.

This is a place where the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians are reclaiming ancestral lands and rights.

This is a place where sons and daughters of Mexican farm workers are mayors and congressmen.

The Dinah and the White Party draws hundreds of thousands of LGBTQ+ partiers to a place that long ago embraced gay and lesbian neighbors, business owners and benefactors.

People visit or stay in the desert in search of themselves or a sense of place that doesn't perfectly align city to city. Coachella Valley is greater than the sum of its parts.

On an average Saturday in September, you could join a Dinah pool party in Palm Springs or a pro-Trump rally of golf carts along ritzy El Paseo drive in Palm Desert.

At Acrisure Arena on Monday night, members of both parties danced to the Village People's Macho Man, a disco-era gay anthem, and Ring of Fire, a country folk song rooted in the power of love and the pull of Christian faith.

Johnny Cash and June Carter added Latin rhythms and horns to Ring of Fire after Cash said he heard them in a dream. By no coincidence at all, fans pouring out of their cars at Acrisure were greeted by the sounds of a Mariachi band.

Music has been a Coachella Valley staple from the Bird Singers to Frank Sinatra to Sonny and Cher to Kyuss.

While the crowds at Goldenvoice's Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival and Stagecoach Country Music Festival have been mocked for appealing to LA fashionistas and weekend cowboys, festival magician Paul Tollett has nurtured this vibrant and strange crossover culture. Chris Stapleton played rock and roll's Coachella before he was huge in country and western. Mavis Staples played Coachella long after she’d secured gospel legend status.

Newcomers Chicano Batman played Coachella on the way up. Emerging visual artist Sofia Enriquez, an Indio native, is a feature, not a sideshow, of the festivals’ polo grounds.

Stagecoach avoids country cliché by booking acts like Amythyst Kiah, Rhiannon Giddens, Charley Crocket, Yola and Smokey Robinson.

What these festivals lack is a micro concentration of people who look and act like locals. It's the same at The Dinah and BNP Paribas. Indio's Tamale Festival is uniquely local but is rooted in the East Valley. The Palm Springs International Film Festival is a wonder of its own but outsized, outsiderish and in the West Valley.

It helps that Acrisure is in the middle of the valley.

The desert needs a unifying force.

Minor league hockey might be its savior.

Greg Burton is the executive editor of The Arizona Republic and former executive editor of The Desert Sun.