New owners of indoor football team in New Mexico explore rebrand in preparation for 2026 season

Indoor football will return to New Mexico next year — albeit with a couple major changes.

After buying the Duke City Gladiators, new owners Mike Fietz and Bob Pitre are in the process of rebranding the Indoor Football League team. The team plans on announcing a new name and securing a venue over the summer before filling out the team’s staff this fall.

Fietz, a managing member at local home builder Westway Homes LLC, and Pitre, the owner of Pitre Buick GMC, bought the team last year from previous owner Gina Prieskorn-Thomas. After becoming the sole owner in 2019, Prieskorn-Thomas said running the team alone became too much due to the failing health of her late husband, Scott, and she started contacting potential buyers midway through last season.

In October, Prieskorn-Thomas announced the team would be inactive this season with plans to return in 2026. The move, she said, was designed to give Fietz and Pitre an opportunity to rebrand while getting to know the 16-year-old IFL, the longest continuously running indoor football league in the country.

“They’re sports guys willing to take that team hopefully to levels that I couldn’t take it,” Prieskorn-Thomas told the Journal on Tuesday, “because I didn’t have the time or the money anymore.”

Since agreeing to terms with Prieskorn-Thomas, Fietz and Pitre have been engaged in a “learning process” covering everything from team trademarks to securing broadcast deals. With next season starting March 2026, Pitre said an “all-out effort” to get ready will begin six months prior; by the end of summer, he hopes to have a “good idea” of which direction the team is going in before naming a new coaching staff.

“It’s (like) a big funnel,” Pitre told the Journal on Wednesday. “And right now, we’re just loading the stuff in the funnel with the information we’re getting. We’re picking (the) brains of other teams and what they’re doing, we’re trying to come up with a new name … we’ll load enough stuff in the funnel and eventually it’ll spiral down.”

In a break from the past, the team will have state-based branding (New Mexico instead of Duke City) with potential names acknowledging the state’s heritage.

“We’re going to come out with something that the people of Albuquerque are going to be really, really excited about,” he told the Journal on Wednesday.

While the team hasn’t signed with any venue, both Pitre and Fietz said they have met with Dan Mourning, the general manager of EXPO New Mexico’s Tingley Coliseum, and are open to the idea of returning to the Gladiators’ initial home. The franchise played at the EXPO-owned arena from 2015-2019 and won back-to-back Champions Indoor Football League titles before moving to Rio Rancho Events Center in 2021.

Prieskorn-Thomas had previously told the Journal attendance began to wane after changing venues. She said the Gladiators lost an average of 1,600 to 3,200 fans per game and retained only five season ticket holders after moving to the Rio Rancho Events Center, where the team’s on-field fortunes gradually bottomed out.

With a capacity of 9,286 fans, Tingley has recently invested upward of $2 million toward installing new seats and upgrading the concourse of the 68-year-old arena.

“We like that location,” Pitre said of Tingley. “If we look at it historically, when the Gladiators were in Tingley, they were profitable.”

No options are off the table, though: For example, the team has considered playing three games at a local arena and two games in Las Cruces (potentially at the Pan American Center) before returning to the Albuquerque metro area for the remainder of the franchise’s eight-game home slate.

“Nothing’s been solidified because we don’t even know if the Pan Am Center can put the field down, and we don’t know the costs associated with it,” Pitre added.

And games in Rio Rancho are still possible. Fietz said he would love to “honor the community” by playing a game or two at the 7,000-seat Rio Rancho Events Center, the future full-time host of a new minor league hockey team.

“The facility is fantastic,” he added. “Tingley is older, but it’s getting a facelift. So we’re weighing all those options right now.”

Pitre said the team wants to purchase new arena boards and new equipment, adding that they’ve mulled over potentially buying a hotel and restaurant to feed and house players. While the team has hired a director of sales and a few other positions, a football staff will be hired in the fall; former Gladiators head coach Sherman Carter has helped advise the owners in that regard.

“We’re not looking to reinvent the wheel,” Pitre said when asked about hiring a new head coach. “At the end of the day, we’re looking for somebody with the expertise of the IFL and its mechanism, and somebody that can understand New Mexico. And that’s what it takes to be successful here.”

While Fietz and Pitre are new to sports ownership, the two have previously worked together on various businesses over the last 15-plus years. The two are equal partners in this venture, one Fietz — a former sponsor of the Gladiators — likened to drinking out of a firehouse without being able to swallow.

“I think if you have the opportunity to see an arena football game in person, it’s one of the most exciting sports you’ll ever be around,” Fietz said. “ … I think the difference between our ownership and other owners in other leagues, we have the wherewithal, the passion, the contact and the drive to bring the best possible product to the market.”

Even if there’s still a long way to go.

“At the end of the day, we listen and we figure it out, and then we’ll make a decision and go with it,” Pitre said. “But if that’s the wrong decision, our egos aren’t that big — we’ll say, ‘OK, we screwed that up. Let’s change it.’ And we’re kind of at that stage right now.”