Page 7 - BusinessWest October 26, 2020

While the AHL is expressing hope that games might be played in early
December, Nate Costa, president
of the Thunderbirds, believes January or
early February is a more likely target for a return to action at the MassMutual
Center.
a far more likely start time. But beyond that, he cannot say with any degree of certainty how — and how many — games might be played, and how late into 2021 the season might go. Instead, there are only question marks — many of them, involving everything from if and how many fans can sit in the stands to if and how this team can travel to away games in other states, let alone Canada.
All these questions, most of them difficult if not impossible to answer at this juncture, make this a difficult, very frustrating time for Costa and all those involved with a franchise that had become one of the feel-good stories in Spring- field over the past several years.
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when the season ended last year,” he noted. “We were ahead of budget, we were on track to make a profit, which was three years in the making. We were in great shape — we had nine sellouts through March last year, which was our previous record, and we had three weekends left and were expecting three more sellouts. The business was in great shape.”
“
commitment to Springfield — we’re not going anywhere. It’s going to be a challenging year for us, like it is for everyone else, but the commitment is there to get through this year and plan for the long term. We’ll get through this ... it’s just going to be tough.
In the proverbial blink of an eye, though, everything changed. The season, and the Mass- Mutual Center, were shut down. Initially, the Thunderbirds, like most businesses closed down by the pandemic, thought it might be a mat-
ter of several weeks before things went back to something approaching normal. As it became clear this wouldn’t be the case, the team — again,
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The ownership has given a
Under Costa’s stewardship and the backing of a large, committed ownership group, Spring- field had gone from a city without hockey after the Falcons departed for Arizona more than five years ago, to one with a franchise that was not only filling the MassMutual Center with increas- ing regularity, but also becoming part of the fab- ric of the region.
Turning the clock back just seven months or so, although it seems like an eternity, to be sure, Costa said the team was clicking on all or most cylinders, meaning everything from ticket and merchandise sales to creating strong partner- ships with a number of area businesses.
“We were, fortunately, in a really good position
”
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