Not baseball, but sports business related

While checking Fortwayne.com for any stories on the downtown baseball product, I found this column by Ben Smith:

K’s Franke worried about state of UHL

You can take it for granted sometimes, what Fort Wayne Komets president Michael Franke sees these days. The game’s a study in miniatures from up here, after all: tiny players moving up and down a gleaming sheet of ice; tiny fans, 5,000 or 6,000 or 7,000 of them, cheering or booing or howling with glee.

Such a small thing, viewed from high up in the Memorial Coliseum press box. Such a huge, huge thing in the larger context.

“We are very blessed to have the crowds we have,” Franke readily acknowledges.

But?

“But there are just way too many cities in minor league hockey that don’t draw well. It’s a concern.”

And so welcome, everyone, to the United Hockey League All-Star game, the third such event to play this city since 1994. I know it’s bad form to rain on these sorts of parades, but you’d best dig out your umbrellas.

The event itself might be glorious, see. But the product’s in trouble.

The product almost everywhere increasingly doesn’t draw flies, and that’s no reflection on the flies. It’s a reflection on a saturated sports culture rapidly approaching its tipping point. It’s a reflection on consumers with not just hundreds but thousands of entertainment choices, all of them competing fiercely for ever-shrinking slivers of a finite pie.

...

Heading into last weekend, the Komets were putting a league-high 7,733 fannies in the seats for every game. That’s impressive, but it’s also a huge anomaly; aside from them, no one in the league’s drawing more than 3,883 a game.

Fully half the league’s below 3,000. Chicago, one of two new franchises this season, is getting only 1,961 per game rattling around the 9,500-seat Sears Centre, where the echoes on game nights must be prodigious. Only Port Huron, putting 1,757 a night in an arena a third the size of the Sears, draws fewer.

Some of this you could have predicted, of course. Putting a franchise in the west suburbs of Chicago, for instance, was a classic “What were you thinking?” moment; with a healthy and successful American Hockey League franchise (the Wolves) and the resuscitated Blackhawks already hogging the Windy City market, it seemed inevitable that a UHL team would be left with scraps. Chicago was never that great a hockey town, even when Bobby Hull was skating a wing.

Throwing all of this into sharper relief, of course, is the soap opera currently underway in Rockford, Ill., where the city has tied renovation of the MetroCentre to ownership of a Blackhawks affiliate. That would force out the IceHogs, the UHL’s second-best drawing team and one of its linchpin franchises.

No way the “U” can afford to lose them.

When I worked for the Gamblers in the USHL, there was a team in Dubuque that was an easy bus ride for everyone else in the league. They didn't draw very well, but there was a not very good ownership. They decided to move to Tulsa, Oklahoma which was the home of an very popular pro hockey team, the Tulsa Oilers. The USHL team was lucky to draw 100 people per night and lasted one season.

The lesson for any league in any sport is this: If you are going to add or move a franchise, know what is there. Like Smith says, the pie is not an all-you-can-eat.

EDITS: I don't like to do this from work, but the error was -- how shall I put it -- glaring. The pro hockey team in Tulsa is called the Oilers. The Tulsa Drillers are the Texas League baseball team. I have also added links to a few of the teams. I was thinking about changing the phrasing at the top from "downtown baseball product" to something that actually makes sense, but why start now?