Page 9 - BusinessWest October 26, 2020

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Meanwhile, the inability to play in front of fans is also presenting a major challenge to the parent league, the NHL, whose franchises own the bulk of the teams in the AHL, with a dozen or so, including the Thunderbirds, being independently owned.
“Even though the perception is that the NHL is this huge entity that can just sustain losses, with them not having the ability to put fans in the stands, that impacts everything,” he explained. “That’s the trunk to the revenue tree. If you don’t have fans, it’s hard to sell sponsorships, and you can’t sell merchandise and concessions. And at our level, that’s what really drives our business — it’s butts in seats.
“In this league, it’s crucially important to have fans in the arena,” he went on. “And that’s what we spent four years doing — rebuild- ing the fan base and packing this arena so that our business would be much more financially solvent.”
But playing games without fans in the stands remains one of the options moving forward, said Costa, calling it a last resort, but still a possibility, especially if he can negotiate with one of the local TV stations to televise some of the games. And talks along those lines are ongoing, he told BusinessWest.
The hope, though, is that, by January or February, the state will allow fans in the arenas with a six-foot-distancing model, he said, referring again to that image on his wall.
“It’s not going to be a ton of people, maybe 1,200 to 1,500 people from what we’re doing with our modeling,” Costa continued. “But
“The thing that has been frustrating and challenging — to everyone, but me in particular — is that we don’t have a lot of control over much of anything at this point. You’re beholden to the state and other states and also to the league ... you can have all the best plans in the world, but if we don’t have the ability to do it and do it safely, then it’s going to be a challenge.”
at least it would get us started, and then the hope would be that, as the spring would move along, we’d be able to bring more bodies into the building.”
That’s the hope. But Costa and his team, as noted, are preparing, as best they can, for a number of contingencies.
“The thing that has been frustrating and challenging — to every- one, but me in particular — is that we don’t have a lot of control over much of anything at this point,” he said. “You’re beholden to the state and other states and also to the league ... you can have all the best plans in the world, but if we don’t have the ability to do it and do it safely, then it’s going to be a challenge.”
Knowing the Score
Next spring will mark the 50th anniversary of the Calder Cup championship run authored by the team known then as the Spring- field Kings, the minor-league affiliate of the then-fledgling Los Angeles Kings.
Costa said the team has been making plans to honor that squad and its accomplishment with a throwback game featuring the Kings’ colors and logos, an on-ice ceremony featuring surviving members of that team, and other events.
Now, most of those plans, as well as those to mark the fifth anni- versary of the Thunderbirds themselves, are in limbo, like just about everything else concerning the 2020-21 season.
Indeed, even as Costa and his team try to prepare for the new season, there are still so many things beyond their control, espe- cially the virus itself. By most accounts, a second wave has com- menced, with cases on the rise in a number of states. Some of those states, and individual communities, have already put a number of restrictions in place as part of efforts to control the spread of the virus, and there may be even more in the weeks and months to come.
The ones already in place create a number of
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Thunderbirds
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