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Posted Jun 28, 2023, 1:01 PM
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Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: Ottawa
Posts: 28,818
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All of these teams started during the pandemic. We even had a rugby team ready to go just before the pandemic hit. Talk about bad luck.
Quote:
The search for fans: Ottawa's minor pro squads look to fill more seats
Marketing a relatively new professional sports product is a challenge for the Ottawa Titans, Ottawa BlackJacks and Atletico Ottawa.
Ken Warren
Published May 19, 2023
Hélène Choinière earned a bonus when she arrived half an hour early for the Ottawa Titans meet-and-greet session with season-ticket holders last week.
Titans infielder Ivan Marin looked up into the stands at Ottawa Stadium, grabbed a ball and played catch with Choinière, who showed up with her glove, with good friend Anneka McVee and her 3½-year-old service dog, Kangee — a black lab, border collie mix — by her side.
“It was so nice of that gentleman to throw the ball with me,” said Choinière, who plans to be at all 51 home games, rain or shine, for the Frontier League franchise.
“To buy season tickets, we had to (scrounge) money from last year and put it aside,” she said. “(McVee and I) are both on (Ontario Disability Support Program), but we both love baseball so much. Last winter, we managed to put our $5, our $2, our $1 aside, thinking, ‘We won’t eat that poutine this week because I want to go to baseball next summer.’”
It’s remarkable dedication towards the second-year independent Frontier League franchise. The roster features former Canadian and American NCAA stars, along with South American standouts who haven’t yet given up on the professional dream despite being unaffiliated with Major League Baseball organizations.
“It’s nice to encourage people,” Choinière said. “It’s like going to a 67’s game in that they’re all aiming to go higher.”
McVee says she gains energy from the crowd.
“I love getting out of the house, being able to meet different people and watch a team,” she said. “It brings you alive.”
Now, if only the Titans and Ottawa’s other fledgling minor pro sports franchises — including soccer’s Atletico Ottawa and basketball’s Ottawa BlackJacks — could bottle up that mood and spread it throughout the city.
All three are in a grind, striving to find their piece of the sporting pie during the summer months when the Ottawa Senators are idle.
Marketing a relatively new professional sports product is a challenge. Unlike the Redblacks, who are bolstered by having generations of historical support for the Canadian Football League, the Titans, Atletico and BlackJacks don’t have firm roots in Ottawa.
The Titans story
The way Titans general manager Martin Boyce sees it, coming to see the team is not necessarily about watching every pitch of every at-bat. It’s more about the setting, delivering family-friendly entertainment.
“The baseball is secondary,” he said. “It’s great if the team wins and we make the playoffs, like we did in our first year, but that’s not something we can count on.”
The season opener on May 12 drew a franchise-record crowd of 3,777, but most of the kids in attendance weren’t sitting down. They were roaming around, watching the goofy promotions, or hanging out in the picnic area down the left-field line.
“That’s the most appealing part of the stadium,” Boyce said. “There’s a craft beer station set up, and the parents can sit at the picnic tables, watching their kids play catch down the hill and talk over the fence to the (Titans) pitchers in the bullpen.”
There was a significant drop off in attendance after the opener, with 1,463 and 1,199 showing up for games to end the first homestand. That’s more in line with the Titans average attendance of 1,368 in 2022, when they enjoyed a late surge due to their run to the post-season.
Boyce says a regular turnout of 2,000 would be “plenty for us,” in keeping with overall Frontier League numbers.
History, of course, hasn’t been kind to minor pro baseball in Ottawa. The Titans are the fifth team to give it a go since 1993. From the Lynx, which launched with much fanfare as the Montreal Expos Triple-A affiliate in 1993, to the Can-Am franchises (Rapidz and Champions) to the Inter-County league squad (The Fat Cats), none have been sustainable.
So how can the Titans, the brainchild of Winnipeg Goldeyes owner Sam Katz, be different?
“It’s always about getting more people familiar with the brand,” Boyce said. “It takes time for people to recognize who we are. Many teams have tried to answer that question before, but we’re selling it as a family affordable place to be.”
Ticket prices range from $11 to $18.
The 10,000-seat park, built for the Lynx, is too big for the Frontier League. Even with the large opening night crowd, there were still more than 6,000 empty seats. Down the road, the Titans could consider removing some seats, creating more speciality areas.
There’s also frustration with long concession lines when the crowds do turn out. The plan is to hire more staff as in-crowd “hawkers” during the action.
While the battle is on to gain attention in the marketplace, the Titans general manager doesn’t believe Atletico or the BlackJacks serve as direct competition.
“Baseball is unique. It’s a place to relax. You can have a conversation at the ballpark,” Boyce said. “The competition might be more about (whether) to go to a movie.”
The Atletico scene
Before Atletico CEO Fernando Lopez first set foot in Canada, he saw a country where soccer was on the rise. The national women’s program was a roll, winning bronze at the 2012 and 2016 Olympics and becoming the toast of Canada by taking home gold in 2021.
At the same time, the men’s program was steadily improving to the point where last summer it qualified for the World Cup for the first time since 1986.
In keeping with that spotlight, grassroots soccer programs were booming.
Accordingly, Lopez believed that the Canadian Premier League, the country’s national pro league, which launched in 2019, was on the cusp of firmly establishing itself in the marketplace. Atletico, affiliated with the renowned Spanish soccer powerhouse Atletico Madrid, aimed to tap into the movement.
The franchise’s beginning in 2020 was difficult, complicated by the arrival of COVID-19, which limited the team to playing in a bubble tournament in Prince Edward Island and another bubble in Winnipeg for the beginning of a dismal 2021 season, which included six wins, 14 losses and eight ties.
But the team made a rapid rise from the bottom to the top of the standings in 2022, winning the regular-season title with a record of 13 wins, five losses and 10 draws. After reaching the championship game against Hamilton-based Forge FC last October, Lopez believed the fan support would jump significantly.
He’s still waiting.
“I never thought the challenge would be this tough,” Lopez said. “Coming in, I was told that soccer was not very popular in (Canada), and to have success as a team in this city, you’ve got to have a winning season. We did that last year. We had a great season, we won the (league) title and hosted the CPL final.”
Atletico doubled the team’s office staff and made inroads into the community — supporting CHEO, Shelter Movers Ottawa and Ukraine — but crowd support has levelled off.
A year ago, Atletico averaged 4,069 fans, second in the CPL behind Halifax (5,825), but that included big numbers for the opener dedicated to Ukraine and for the championship game.
“I wasn’t thinking we would sell out TD Place with 24,000 fans, but we’re all scratching our heads to make it an exciting event for fans,” Lopez said. “It’s still very hard.”
In an effort to create a European soccer-like vibe inside TD Place, the Capital City Supporters Group is hard to miss and hear during games, chanting and singing throughout. Lopez is continuing to push to add more entertainment around the game, recognizing that traditional North American audiences are conditioned to see bigger numbers on the scoreboard in hockey, football, basketball and baseball games.
Atletico is also making a determined effort to develop its own talent through training camps in the city. Russell native Tyr Walker made his CPL debut earlier this season, joining a roster that includes fellow Canadians, along with European talent.
“We’re going to get there,” Lopez said. “It’s just a process. We would love to see 10,000-15,000 at each game and be able to show people why it’s the No. 1 sport globally. The average ticket price is $25. It’s not only a problem in Ottawa, it’s a problem across the country.”
Indeed, the CPL’s Edmonton franchise, which drew a league-low average of 1,071 and was run by the league in 2022, folded in November. In April, the CPL also took over York FC, which had drawn only 1,234 fans last year on average.
Considering Canada’s improvement on the world stage, it’s a frustrating experience trying to build a cross-country league. Lopez is willing to be creative.
“I don’t know, maybe I will go naked around the city with a big Ottawa Atletico sign if that would help,” he said with a laugh.
The BlackJacks Vibe
The BlackJacks, and the Canadian Elite Basketball League as a whole, pride themselves on being unique in their branding and their style of play.
The upstart league, now in its fifth season, is geared around surrounding a growing number of star Canadian players with talent from the United States and Europe.
Operating in the summer, in the off-months of the competitive North American and European season, the CEBL has attracted a high skill level. Former NBA player Walt Lemon Jr. played for the BlackJacks in 2022. The league’s ELAM ending to games—where the game clock shuts off in the fourth quarter, and teams must instead reach a target score to win—creates additional drama in the final moments and music plays throughout the action.
Just the same, it hasn’t firmly established itself in the hearts of Ottawa’s sporting fans just yet. The BlackJacks entered the CEBL in the thick of the pandemic in 2020, but, even with the club guaranteed a spot in the league’s Final Four as the host team last season, attendance ranged from 1,400 to 2,300 in 2022.
The lone exception was a visit by Scarborough when its lineup featured Grammy Award-winning rapper J. Cole, an occasion that brought 3,538 fans to TD Place.
Game-day ticket prices range from $35 to $140 and CEBL commissioner and CEO Mike Morreale says the break-even mark for teams is an average attendance of approximately 2,500.
Morreale is confident the numbers will improve in Ottawa if and when local ownership takes over. The belief is that partners with connections to the community will be in a better position to market the organization.
Originally, the league owned all the teams, but six clubs have since moved away from that model.
“We’ve seen a big rise in revenues, including ticket revenues, from the teams that are privately owned,” Morreale said.
The CEBL has experienced too much franchise movement. Hamilton, the 2022 champion, has since moved to Brampton. Fraser Valley has shifted to Vancouver, and the former Guelph franchise now calls Calgary home. After only one season in 2022, the team based in St. John’s, N.L., folded, but a new squad has since arrived in Winnipeg.
“There’s no desire to move or relocate any further,” Morreale said.
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