PLANO, TEX.

This affluent community of 260,000 people, often picked as one of the best places to live in America, is also one of the most popular homes to corporate America.

Driving along its flat and featureless terrain ("Plano" is Spanish for flat) among its twisting overpasses, you'll see the corporate headquarters of companies like Dell and Hewlett-Packard, Dr. Pepper-Snapple and Pizza Hut, CA Technologies and Ericsson. The city is thus responsible for producing a wide variety of some of the most popular consumer products in America.

Laptops.

Smart phones.

Pizza.

You can apparently add another product to the list: blue chip hockey prospects.

This suburb in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex could very well be home to the top pick in the 2013 NHL draft, giving Plano two first-round picks in the last three years.

That's potentially two more than, say, Montreal has produced in that time.

Defenceman Seth Jones, the son of former NBA power forward Popeye Jones and Red Line scouting report's projected No. 1 next summer, spent time growing up here when his dad was playing for the Mavericks. Stefan Noesen, the Plymouth Whalers forward who was picked 21st overall in the 2011 draft by the Ottawa Senators, is a Plano native and played here until he moved north at 14.

Chris Brown, a second-round pick of the Phoenix Coyotes in 2009 who now attends the University of Michigan, also played his minor hockey here (his first hockey was played in Raleigh, N.C.).

They played their minor hockey here, learned the game here, saw their passion for the game grow one town over from Irving and the long shadow cast by Texas Stadium and the Dallas Cowboys.

"It's great seeing guys come out of there. To see other guys coming out of there kind of makes me smile," said Noesen. "We're showing there's other places out there that can develop players other than Canada or Michigan or Minnesota. We're showing we can produce players like those other places."

Noesen got turned on to hockey as a tyke when his great grandfather, who he says had roots back to Canada, showed him the motions of skating on the living room floor of his home in Lubbock, Tex., hometown of Noesen's mother. He figures he was two or three years old.

"Not long after when we were back home (in Plano), I told my parents in so many words I wanted to play hockey," he said. "The Stars moved there when I was born and when I was starting out they had started leagues."

Plano is a prime example of the growth of hockey in the U.S. A non-traditional hockey market, the arrival of the Dallas Stars in 1993 -- the year Noesen was born -- planted another hockey seed in the American west.

Recognizing they needed to grow a generation of hockey fans -- what better way than to get them playing the game? -- the Stars, led by president Jim Lites (he's back for a third term under new owner Tom Gaglardi as president and CEO) and then-general manager Bob Gainey started an aggressive program that led to rink building (there are now six Dr. Pepper StarCenters in the Metroplex), a program that reawakened the passion for hockey in older fans and started a love for the game among younger ones.

Lites had come from Detroit, where Red Wings owner Mike Ilitch's involvement in the Detroit Little Caesars minor hockey program has produced more than 100 players who went on the NHL.

"The surprising part when we got there was there were a lot of latent hockey players from the Northeast, from Michigan, from different places in Canada who had put their skates away because they didn't think they had anywhere to play," said Gainey. "When we opened up the arena that we used as our practice facillity, one way to manage the ice and make some money was to run these rec leagues and they just exploded. There were a lot of people there already who had interest, but for lack of a way to express it had let it go."

Gainey' son, Steve, played hockey in the local minor system and was ultimately drafted by his dad.

In places like Los Angeles, Phoenix, Florida and even in Nashville, minor hockey programs have sprung up -- strong triple-A programs -- mirroring what has happened in Dallas and growing the footprint of grassroots hockey in the U.S., contributing to the number of blue chip prospects being produced.

chris.stevenson@sunmedia.ca

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