May Mayhem to Hook 'em on Hockey
The Kelly Cup winds up. The Calder Cup wraps. Who cares?
The minor league hockey season is too long. The American Hockey League (AHL) and the East Coast Hockey League (ECHL) playoff systems follow the NHL format to capitalize on weekend dates, but winding down in late May to early June is tough in a lot of the markets where it is now summer.
Sure, the hard core hockey fans will hang with you. You better have enough to fill up the barns though, because the fickle casual fan has already discovered that it is warm outside. They have moved on to greener pastures, usually with baseballs dropping into them.
The name of the game in the minor league sports is casual fan attraction. You can't develop more die-hards until you get them to games, especially playoff games, and get them excited.
The Central Hockey League (CHL) has the right idea. Get done in April to very early May, after March Madness and before the baseball season goes into full swing.
Following the National Hockey League into the Memorial Day weekend is fine, if you're a lemming, and you don't have an aversion to falling off large cliffs.
As damaged as the NHL has been from its strike, they have substantially more resources and media coverage to see them into the dog days of summer than do the minors. The Stanley Cup may have a lot of tarnish on it, but it will still rank national television coverage.
Even the NHL would benefit from finding a season pattern that keeps them out of the NBA playoffs. Their season is too long, and they need to build core audience as well. April-May is the logical hole in the general schedule of sports.
If the calendar weren't crowded enough, the Arena Football League (AFL), which shares a number of markets with hockey, runs ArenaBowl at the beginning of June. The AFL is growing. They have two letters that the AHL or ECHL don't have: TV. Broadcast television has helped add nearly twenty million fans to AFL arenas in the last few years. It's the single fastest rise in independent sports.
Minor hockey doesn't have that kind of juice, nor will they. The ECHL finals are Gwinnett and Alaska. Great teams in a highly regionalized sport. Even television coverage of the event will only pull a die-hard demographic. The subtleties of AA ice hockey are lost on a larger national audience, particularly in major markets where the first question out of Joe Fan's mouth will be "Where the f*ck is Gwinnett?" followed by the voluntary muscle spasms of his hand around the remote to switch to Dog - The Bounty Hunter.
Success in minor league hockey is not about TV. It's about butts in seats. How many more do you get when you have an open shot at their best level of attention?
Here's my marketing hook for the purist puck-o-phile: May Mayhem. It would give minor hockey a marketing angle and a great niche in an already very crowded sports schedule. It would give them a core month to ding their arch rival: NECK-CAR (NASCAR) for media time and attention.
Baseball in the minors and indies really peters out by mid-September. With call-ups, and expansions of the roster, even the combat for league titles is watered down by the fact that many of the players on the team are now with major league clubs. Starting earlier would certainly be possible.
Better scheduling might make more of the fair-weather fans hang around long enough to get hooked on hockey before the lure of "play ball" drags them off to their summer seats.
More people should care what goes on in the Calder and the Kelly cup, which are often more exciting than even the combat for Lord Stanley's prize. Keep the game hot, and the weather cool, and more success will follow.
Brian Ross
in Hockey, Sports Business
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