Page 7 - BusinessWest August 8, 2022

Nate Costa says one of the team’s goals was to make the playoff experience different for the fans and the players, with rally towels and banners like this one.
For starters, the team was starting up again after deciding not to play during the 2020-21 sea- son, when COVID was at its height and the AHL was playing a shorter schedule with a host of restrictions and, for the most part, no fans. This meant assembling a team of employees (with many returnees from before COVID) and re- engaging with a fan base.
But mostly, it meant dealing with a pandemic that kept coming in waves and was still very
much a disruptive force, especially for businesses dependent on bringing large numbers of people together in closed spaces.
“It’s been a long year,” said Costa, putting heavy emphasis on that word ‘long.’ “We dealt with a lot of ups and downs; there were a lot of challenges. Groups were essentially non-existent because schools weren’t doing anything, and we were living in a real COVID world for half the year. January and February were some dark months where we still wearing masks and there were potential capacity limita- tions ... we were dealing
with that all year, and it was a really taxing and challenging environment to work through. It was exhausting.”
While dealing with these challenges, the Thunderbirds, thanks to a solid mix of estab- lished veterans and emerging prospects, estab- lished themselves as not only a playoff contender (23 of the league’s 31 teams would qualify for postseason play for the 2021-22 season following some changes to the format), but as a frontrun- ner. Indeed, the team forged its way near the top of the Atlantic Division of the Eastern Conference and stayed there for the bulk of the season.
By the spring, the team’s consistently solid
play made a playoff birth likely, and then inevi- table, giving Costa and his team a chance to start planning — as much as any organization can plan a playoff run, even with a bye in the first round, which the T-Birds earned by finishing sec- ond overall in the Atlantic Division.
Indeed, the playoffs are to be taken one series — and, in many respects, one game — at a time, he said, adding that, while a playoff run can benefit a team’s bottom line, there are many
“I’m going to take the playoff run and everything that came with it over a longer offseason.”
additional expenses, especially travel and logis- tics, and some challenges when it comes to ticket sales, including the loss of all-important group sales.
“Every series is like a mini-season, the way
we market it and the way you go through the process, because you don’t know what’s going
to happen; it’s all dependent on your perfor- mance on the ice. At the beginning of the run,
we wanted it to make it feel different and feel separate from the regular season, and so, from a marketing perspective, we put together an entire campaign around the playoffs,” Costa explained, including a hashtag slogan — Fly, Fight, Win! — that was a nod to the Air Force. “It was complete- ly different from what our regular-season market- ing campaign was.”
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