How Can We Fix It?

Full disclosure: I am the PA announcer for the Peoria Rivermen hockey team, and have been for 11 of the last 12 years. I love hockey. I desire to see the Rivs draw better. The front office works incredibly hard to try and draw more fans to Rivermen hockey fans. That being said…read on… 

My good friend (and solid reporter) Dave Eminian is correct in today’s column in the PJStar when he says the Rivermen front office staff has struck some attendance gold in the last couple of months:

The Rivermen have hit a home run on a new marketing strategy, which is to bring in celebrities from soap operas, to Nickelodeon and Disney TV shows, pro wrestling and post-game concerts.

It has helped the franchise turn the corner at the box office, quite a feat at a time when most minor-league hockey teams are showing downtrends in attendance.

What David unfortunately does NOT mention is this year’s average attendance, which is now 4,194 per game. That figure ranks a lowly 21st in the 29-team AHL. That puts the Rivermen about 900 UNDER the league average, but ahead of fellow Illinois AHL teams in Rockford (25th at 3,683) and Quad City (27th at 3,432). Chicago (6,981, 4th in the league) is the best-drawing AHL team in the state.

Further, this year’s average is almost 200 below LAST year’s final average (4,386), which belies Dave’s comment that the we’ve “turned the corner”. Maybe from beginning of this year to the current date, but not when one compares the past.

Here’s the past few years:

2005-2006 - (1st year in AHL) - 4,7

2004-2005 - 4,785 (last year in ECHL), 10th overall out of 28

2003-2004 - 5,101, 3rd overall out of 31 teams!

2002-2003 - 5,394, 4th overall out of 27

As a matter of fact, this year’s attendance is lower than any since the team moved from the IHL to the ECHL in 1996. For the record, Dave used to give weekly updates in his column on Rivermen attendance, but they have not been there so much this year.

Again, I have been part of the Rivermen culture since I moved here in 1996. I love hockey. I cannot understand why the team cannot consistently draw the 6-7,000 fans it draws on occasional Saturday nights.

So I’m asking those in the Peoria blogosphere: Why? Why are there not more fans at games? What do you desire the team do to attract you to go to a game? More promotions? More fights on the ice? Less fights? Cheaper concessions? What is it?

Hockey is tremendous fun when it’s viewed live. You DO NOT need to “understand” the game to enjoy it. Heck, there’s really only two confusing rules: icing and offsides, which become completely understandable after you get a quick, easy-to-grasp explanation. Other than that, it’s a lot like basketball…teams pass and skate and try to put the “ball” (in this case, of course, a puck) into the goal. And it’s a lot like football…teams hit and defend and try to stop the other team from getting the puck across the goal line and into the goal.

So what is it going to take to get the attendance this sport deserves in Peoria (and Rockford and the QC for that matter)? What would make you go to the game?

Look How Far We Haven’t Come In 50 Years

This week we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first black player in the NHL, Willie O’Ree, who was called up this month in 1958 by the Boston Bruins. O’Ree, who had lost the vision in his right eye in a junior league game long before his call up, kept that fact secret from the Bruins, because he wanted to play in the NHL so badly. There were only “The Original Six” teams back then…imagine how hard it was to make it when only the absolute best 120 players made it to the show.

A two sport star, O’Ree tried baseball first. Unfortunately, as he left his native Canada and landed in Southern Georgia to try out for the Milwaukee Braves organization, he encountered racism for the first time in his life, when he saw restrooms that had “whites only” and “blacks only” signs on them. He later came back to hockey. O’Ree’s NHL career consisted of only 45 games. He was fast and tough, but according to the USA Today story about him this week, the Bruins needed him to score. In that respect, he struggled, scoring only 4 goals. He was sent back down the next season, where he played 15 more years in the minors.

Sadly, much like Jackie Robinson before him, O’Ree has had to live with the death threats and racial taunts. But, here’s the important part and the point of this post: those death threats did NOT happen in 1958, or in his minor league hockey career.

(more…)

Part Of The Game…Always

True hockey fans know and accept that fighting - not the gratuitious, do-it-because-you-do-it-every-game style, but the “time to stick up for myself and my teammates” style - is a major part of adult hockey. Many newbies to the sport feel it has no place in the game, all the while enjoying the mugging that is every college basketball rebound and the controlled violence that is every helmet-first football tackle.

Sunday afternoon’s Peoria Rivermen game showed exactly why fighting has been, is and always should be part of the sport’s allure. The three largest sustained moments of crowd excitement yesterday? The three battles. The turning point in the game? The final of the three bouts, when Rivermen winger and Blues prospect Nikolay Lemtyugov dropped his gloves for the first time since coming to North America, and pummeled a Quad City defenseman who had been dogging him and shoving him for an entire shift.

The result was a huge ovation, a huge turn of emotion, and a wake up call to his teammates (Peoria was trailing 2-0 at the time, and while playing hard, were becoming increasingly frustrated - having scored but 1 goal on Quad City goalie Brent Krahn in over 95 minutes of hockey covering Sunday and the previous night.

Jean Guy Trudel scored just over a minute later, and scored again a couple of minutes after that. When Steve Wagner blasted home a slapper with 1.1 seconds left in the period, the Rivermen went to the locker room up 3-2, thanks in no small part to Lemtyugov’s decision to stand up for himself.

PJ Star writer Dave Eminian correctly awarded Lemtyugov the game’s “Third Star” afterwards, based solely on that momentum-turning, crowd-arousing bout. Several other sports staffers at the paper, good friends of mine, think that fighting should be outlawed. Astute hockey observers know better.