The deal to bring the Washington Wizards and Washington Capitals to Alexandria may be as dead as a roadkill possum, but the recriminations over why the deal collapsed are still very much alive.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin blames the state Senate — by which he means Senate Finance Committee chair Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth.
Team owner Ted Leonisis blames Richmond, in general. “Virginia’s kind of two states,” he said after he announced the teams would stay in D.C. “It’s Richmond and it’s Northern Virginia, and they need to get together.”
That prompted Karri Peifer of Axios Richmond to point out that Virginia’s a little more complicated than that. Maybe a lot more complicated. “First of all, Virginia is not two states, at least from a Richmonder’s perspective,” she wrote. “It’s at least six: Richmond, NoVa, Hampton Roads, Charlottesville, Roanoke and whatever the hell is west of Roanoke.”
Umm, excuse me?
This is a good witty line and I may have tried to write a few like it in my time. On the other hand, as we say out here in these parts, “Them’s fighting words.”
It’s not as if those of us on this side of the state haven’t heard that kind of thing before. On the other hand, as they say in politics, an attack unanswered is an attack agreed to. We just can’t let this kind of thing go by without some kind of response.
First, I’ll point out that there are a lot more than six parts of Virginia. I notice the Shenandoah Valley and Southside didn’t make that list, either. Or Lynchburg. Or … well, let’s not go down that rabbit hole. Instead, let’s deal with “whatever the hell is west of Roanoke.”
Here at Cardinal, we have readers all over the state, and maybe some of them are quietly wondering the same thing. I often hear from some of those readers and I always ask them why they’re reading us. Their answer is often some form of “You’re telling us about a part of the state we don’t know anything about.” Fair enough. So here’s my attempt to describe “whatever the hell is west of Roanoke.”
We have more college students than anywhere else in Virginia.
We have three state universities west of Roanoke. That starts with Virginia Tech, which has the largest on-campus undergraduate enrollment of any university in the state (30,504 in fall 2023), but also includes Radford University and the University of Virginia’s College at Wise. When you count graduate students, that’s 47,747 students at three state schools, according to the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.
That’s more than the 28,594 at Richmond’s lone state four-year school, Virginia Commonwealth University. Or the 40,184 at Northern Virginia’s lone state four-year school, George Mason University.
That also doesn’t count the 1,359 students at the private Emory & Henry College, the 873 at Bluefield University (which is on the Virginia side of the state line), the 725 students at the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine, the 125 students at the Appalachian College of Pharmacy, or the Appalachian School of Law, which has 120 students. All that adds up to 50,949 students — more than the 42,764 at the four four-year schools, both public and private, in South Hampton Roads (Old Dominion, Norfolk State, Regent University, Virginia Wesleyan College), more than the 34,085 at the three four-year schools in Richmond (VCU, the University of Richmond and Virginia Union).
And this list doesn’t count the five community colleges west of the Roanoke Valley, whose combined enrollment of 12,630 makes them collectively bigger than J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College in Richmond.
“Whatever the hell is west of Roanoke” is basically the largest concentration of college students in the state. (Technically, Roanoke College in Salem is west of Roanoke, too, but for our purposes here, I’m counting anything west of the Roanoke Valley.)
We have cutting-edge technology.
There’s a reason why Cardinal has a full-time technology reporter. We have Google’s Wing division operating commercial deliveries by drone in Christiansburg. Torc is working on self-driving vehicles. Volvo and Trova are making electric trucks. Pulaski County is growing a cluster of tech-based companies, including the carbon-capture MOVA Technologies and the indoor agriculture firm Vegg, which has just used MOVA technology to produce its first indoor crop of lettuce. That’s why a Brookings Institution report in 2022 found that the New River Valley had the third-highest growth rate for tech jobs in the country.
Another Brookings report last year found that the state’s fastest growth in “highly digitalized” jobs was in … the Big Stone Gap micropolitan area. Granted, it’s easy to get fast growth from a small base, but that report said the Big Stone Gap area had more highly digitalized jobs than Roanoke. Brookings also found that Virginia’s coal country was growing tech jobs at a faster rate than almost anywhere else in Appalachia. The only exceptions were two college towns: Morgantown, West Virginia and … our own Blacksburg.
The Richmond-Petersburg area won one of the coveted “tech hubs” that the Biden administration has designated for federal research spending under the CHIPS and Science Act — but a consortium from the New River Valley and Danville was in the second tier of winners for money, too, for advanced manufacturing and materials.
“Whatever the hell is west of Roanoke” is not sitting around waiting for the mines to reopen and the mills to come back. Some places are admittedly ahead of others, but every community I know of is working at some level to invent a new economy.
We have a food scene.
Abingdon won first place in USA Today’s “best small town food scene” for four years in a row, before being bumped to second place last year by Lewisburg, West Virginia. Bristol chef Travis Milton is in the running for one of the most prestigious culinary awards in the country. Chef Sean Brock, whose cookbooks have made the New York Times bestseller list, is from Wise County. Don’t jump to conclusions about what kind of foods we like, either. One of the most popular food trucks in the region is The Pakalachian, an Abingdon-based food truck that combines traditional Appalachian fare with Pakistani dishes. “Whatever the hell is west of Roanoke” includes a plate of Curry Me Down South.
But wait, that’s not all.
We have ten state parks west of Roanoke, more than anywhere else in the state. Much of the Blue Ridge Parkway and Appalachian Trail in Virginia is west of Roanoke. So is most of the Crooked Road Music Heritage Trail. While we’re on the subject of music, there are major music festivals west of Roanoke — the Old-Time Fiddlers Convention in Galax, Rhythm and Roots in Bristol, the award-winning Blue Highway Festival in Big Stone Gap. I’ll resist the opportunity to do a whole travelogue but I’d be remiss not to mention that Virginia’s official state theater, the Barter Theatre, is also west of Roanoke. There’s also a professional hockey team west of Roanoke, the Blue Ridge Bobcats of Wytheville who play in the Federal Prospects Hockey League. Come in the summer and you can watch summer league baseball in Pulaski’s Calfee Park, one of those most storied ballparks in the country not named Fenway or Wrigley. It’s been voted a fan favorite multiple times. Want to know about what “whatever the hell is west of Roanoke?” Y’all come see us and find out! You won’t be bored.
We’re in a different state (of mind).
I understand why it’s easy to dismiss the western part of the state. We’re a long way away from Richmond — and lots of other places. Roanoke is closer to two other state capitals than it is to our own, and the numbers go up from there. By the time you get out to Ewing in western Lee County, you’re closer to nine other state capitals than our own. Distance creates different perspectives: A study a few years ago by two geographers found that, based on commuting patterns, the western part of the state was economically disconnected from the rest of Virginia — we tend to look south to North Carolina or west to Tennessee. It’s not just our rivers that run west and south; so do our people.
The whole controversy over whether the Wizards and Capitals would move to Virginia meant very little out here. Those aren’t the teams we root for.
Vivid Seats, a ticket reseller, has produced maps showing the most popular teams in each county in the country. Across much of Southside and Southwest, the most popular NBA team isn’t the Wizards, it’s the Charlotte Hornets. In Southside, the most popular NHL team is the Carolina Hurricanes. In Southwest Virginia, it’s the Nashville Predators.
We hate to break it to you, but our disinterest in Washington teams applies to other sports, too. In this part of Virginia, the top NFL teams tend to be either the Carolina Panthers or the Tennessee Titans, according to Vivid, not the Washington team. In baseball, the Atlanta Braves dominate my beloved Washington Nationals — until you get far enough west in Virginia that the Cincinnati Reds radio network takes over.
I understand why some on the eastern side of the state might wonder about “whatever the hell is west of Roanoke.” We’re a long way away and we often look a different direction. But we do the same, as well — except we wonder about “whatever the hell is east of Roanoke.”
